Non-fictional Writings Research Articles

Epicenter: Deep Mapping Place in Fiction and Nonfiction

EpicenterDeep Mapping Place in Fiction and Nonfiction Rilla Askew (bio) Key Words James Baldwin, indigenous writers, literature of place, Oklahoma, race, John Steinbeck, Tulsa Race Riot, white privilege, writing place As a novelist and a nonfiction writer, I'm always looking to tell America's story. That sounds ostentatiously ambitious, I know, but I think every writer of place holds the seeds of that story, just as every landscape speaks to the whole. My internal writing map begins tightly focused in the place of my birth, southeastern Oklahoma, and radiates outward in concentric circles, like an earthquake map showing seismic waves of energy rolling out from the epicenter, in smaller and smaller blips of intensity, all the way to the coasts. I write to interpret us to the larger world. More essentially, I write to discover us to ourselves—and by us, I mean that core at the center of my literary map: I mean Oklahomans. That's where the greatest force is, where the hardest truths lie. I didn't always know this. When I was young as a writer, I had few literary references to help me understand who we are as a people, what our story has been. I read The Grapes of Wrath, but for all that I admired John Steinbeck's language and the Joads' character, their voices and sensibilities were not anything I recognized as belonging to us. I read Edna Ferber's Cimarron, but delighted as I was by her quip in the foreword, "Anything can happen in Oklahoma. Practically everything has," I didn't recognize her characters as people I knew. The characters in S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders were more familiar to me, but I think perhaps they're familiar to anyone who has ever been a teenager or an outsider—or both. Susy Hinton grew up fifty miles from me, in the same era I did, and in my junior high school we were also divided into socs and greasers, but teen angst and bullying and lost love and gang violence may take place anywhere. When I started out, I thought all stories might take place anywhere—anywhere, that is, except the bland, boring, achingly ordinary [End Page 259] land of my birth. And so I wrote stories set in the place where I then lived, New York City. I wrote stories set in places I'd visited, Mexico City, California. I wrote one story set somewhere I'd never been, a train rattling through the night in Yugoslavia. Because of my reading experiences, I believed these were the kinds of places fit for fiction. I did not think the little oil company town at the edge of the tallgrass prairie where I grew up, or the hardscrabble mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, where my family had lived for five generations, were places worthy of fiction. But then I read William Faulkner. I read Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, all the great white southern writers, and in their characters' voices I heard rhythms and syntax I recognized. These were the voices of my parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, preachers and neighbors and cousins in the little town in southeastern Oklahoma where I had spent my summers as a child. Then I read Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. Here, too, were voices I recognized: the voices of kids in my hometown of Bartlesville who lived across the tracks, went to Frederick Douglass Elementary, and, when we finally did attend school together, took separate buses to get there, sat at separate tables in the cafeteria. They were voices I'd heard only from a distance, but they were familiar to me, recognizable in a way that Ma Joad's voice never was. Then I read James Baldwin. And my dungeon shook. My dungeon isn't the one Baldwin himself writes of from the inside, but its twin, its spirit double: the prison of white dominance and privilege I'd grown up inside without any awareness I was caught there. I wish I could tell you my prison doors sprang open and the chains fell off, like the story of Paul and Silas in the Bible, but not...

Beasts in the Jungle: Henry James, William James, and the Animal Turn

Beasts in the Jungle:Henry James, William James, and the Animal Turn Daniel Hannah (bio) The "animal question"—the question of how to read and respond to the ontological, epistemological, and moral status of nonhuman animals—has become, as Sherryl Vint notes, the "pressing political question of our times."1 Recent work by Michael Lundblad and Benjamin Bateman has sought to apply an "animal turn" of the screw to the writing of Henry James, finally asking us to take seriously the beastly quality of James's "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903). This article seeks to situate such recent work in a broader account of James's investment in animality, one that can be traced through a range of his fiction and nonfiction writings, especially his major novels The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Golden Bowl (1904); in each instance, my argument traces suggestive correspondences between Henry James's animal imaginings and William James's theorizations of the encounter between human consciousness and nonhuman instinct, theorizations that engaged with contemporaneous philosophical and political debates about the status, the instrumental value, and the suffering of nonhuman animals. Where Joshua Schuster finds only "limited formalizations of the animal" in modernist literature, formalizations that tend to displace "[a]ctual animals" with "a certain kind of reductive caricature of modernist 'animality,'" James's fiction suggests an alternative path for the emergence of modernist prose as his writing self-consciously recoils from the risks of rhetorically emptying out the animal as a figure for human modernity.2 My argument begins, however, by querying some of the critical assumptions that have led to the recent focus on the tale of John Marcher and his beastly destiny; [End Page 371] we should pause before claiming James as, in Bateman's words, "queerly environmentalist."3 While James's writing is alert to the danger of objectification inherent in a language of animality, it also insistently troubles the kinds of ethical detachment that, at times, guides analytic approaches to thinking about the animal. James's fiction often turns on its ambiguous treatment of the imaginative overlap between a distancing that would recognize the ethical obligations posed by the animal in all its otherness and a detachment that allows for that animal other's violent erasure.4 While my primary focus in this article is on the narrative processes by which James worked through the "animal question" in fiction, it is worthwhile to note the peculiar flavor of the narratives that gathered around his relationships with animals during his lifetime. James's acquaintances were prone to make connections between the Master's late manner and his attentions, and inattention, to companion species. Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford) tells a delightful tale of a walk with James, John Galsworthy, and James's dachshund, Max in which the Master halts, "plant[s] his stick firmly in the ground," in "order to round off an immense sentence," only to discover at the sentence's end that Max had "passed between [their] six legs again and again, threading his leash behind him"—Heuffer declares "we must have resembled the Laocoon, but when Maximillian had finished the resemblance must have been overwhelming."5 Bay Emmett noted both her cousin Henry's propensity "to express his thoughts, unanswered" and his delightfully silly worship of his dog, "little Peter": "Cousin Henry seizes him & brushes him hard & then hugs & kisses him, talking to him all the time in a way that is so silly that I have to die laughing."6 Violet Hunt tells the story of James's animated talk while holding her niece's Persian kitten: "He quite forgot the poor beast, which was too polite and too squeezed between the upper and the nether millstone of the great man's hands to remind him of its existence, and I dared not rescue it until the sentence on which Mr James was engaged was brought to a close—inside of half an hour" (Nowell-Smith, The Legend of the Master, 123). Where Hunt feared James's forgetting of the very beast before him, E. S. Nadal recalls a scene in which James invoked his "dachshund bitch" as an active participant in their risqué conversation...

The Audacity of a Middle Period: An Introduction

392 CLA JOURNAL The Audacity of a Middle Period: An Introduction Michael Hill, Jessica Welburn Paige, and Deborah Whaley Ta-Nehisi Coates commands varied attention. As 2017 ended, he provoked approval from Annette Gordon Reed, a pound from Walton Muyumba, and critique from Cornel West.1 These reactions not only hint at the range of opinions about Coates but also affirm his status as an intellectual celebrity. Determining the meaning of such affirmation requires a long view of black creativity. When James Weldon Johnson wrote about “black and unknown bards” whose routes to artistic expression caused “a wide, wide wonder,” he did not have 21st century writers in mind (769-770). Still, his focus on the circumstances under which black authors could “lift” their “voice and sing” clarify as much about Ta-Nehisi Coates as they do about Lucy Terry, David Walker, and Anna Julia Cooper. Johnson recognized that black art constitutes a reaction against anonymity. If Coates did not experience slavery and Jim Crow like earlier black authors, then he did confront an America that had a hard time seeing where blackness fit into national identity. Prior black writers addressed this problem by exploring tropes like invisibility, misnaming , and marginalization. While Coates’s work dialogues with these themes, his abiding preoccupation is racial reckoning in democracy’s shadows. His probing of this topic acquires greater significance because his most celebrated efforts coincide with the election of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States. In light of 2018, how should the public understand Coates? The editors of this special issue believe that he should be analyzed as a black writer.2 Although that label sounds satisfactory, it begs the question of whether Coates is best labeled a writer of fiction or nonfiction, a deft user of tweets, blogs, and comments or a savant of journalistic essays and memoirs. He defies easy characterization, yet his centrality remains a marker of a shift in the intellectual currents of black society. From a moment when the preacher,the politician,and,more recently,the academic 1 For the pieces where Gordon-Reed, Muyumba, and West offer their perceptions, see respectively “We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates review–On White Supremacy,”“Ta-Nehisi Coates Blazes a Singular Intellectual Path in We Were Eight Years in Power,” and “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle.” These three pieces offer but a sampling of the wide attention that Coates inspired. 2 Our approach in part echoes the sentiment of Jamelle Bouie who observed that We Were Eight Years in Power (2017), Coates’s most recent book, suggested that he should be evaluated “as a writer, nothing more and nothing less.” For a fuller account, see Bouie. CLA JOURNAL 393 The Audacity of a Middle Period: An Introduction prevailed as signature figures in the arena of black public intellectual endeavor, Coates signals an extension and a customization of the ascendancy of the writer. To understand Coates and this development, we must relentlessly pursue context. After the Civil Rights era and the passage of legislation like the Voting Rights Act, the articulation of black cares and concerns increasingly migrated away from the moral milieu of the ministerial class and towards the realpolitik manipulations of mayors, city council members, and state/national legislators. This development did not occur all at once; however, gradually, the vital tasks of speaking on behalf of Black America fell to a class of individuals whose chief obligations dovetailed with governance. From the mayoral cohort that featured people like Carl B. Stokes, Maynard Jackson, and Coleman Young to the presidential candidates like Charlene Mitchell, Shirley Chisolm, and Margaret Wright, the presence of a robust black political class in the 1970s signaled the indisputable, if circumscribed, gains that greater integration delivered. If this group indicated one fairly quick harvest from civil rights activism, then the proliferation and the visibility of black academics suggest a slower, yet equally important emergence. The vital role that academics like Charles Johnson (sociology) and Charles Hamilton Houston (law) played in challenging segregation may have been obscured by the more conspicuous operation of black lawyers. While that situation may have prevailed...

Creating Flannery O'Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers by Daniel Moran

Reviewed by: Creating Flannery O'Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers by Daniel Moran Jordan Rowan Fannin Creating Flannery O'Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers. By Daniel Moran. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. ix, 253. $39.95. ISBN 978-9-8203-4954-1.) In Creating Flannery O'Connor, Daniel Moran early offers the nuance of his book's subject: not O'Connor's literary reputation—why she matters—but the creation of her reputation, or how she mattered and to whom (p. 9). Admittedly, the scope of this investigation is ambitious, for Moran does not confine himself to O'Connor's oeuvre in its inspiration and creation; rather, he endeavors to seat O'Connor's cultural and literary legacy within a complex matrix of how the "author's work, personality, and even image are marketed, packaged, presented, adapted, and received" (p. 2). O'Connor's reputation, he reminds, can be understood not simply as a phenomenon resulting from her talent alone but also "as the result of a network of events, chance occurrences, personal relationships, media adaptations, cultural [End Page 371] institutions, and websites" (p. 8). Moran is most deft at articulating this matrix as a trajectory. Throughout the work, he assembles "the history of [O'Connor's] critical reception and literary identity" (p. 3) in such a way that we might cast our gaze forward and backward at once. We muse with Moran over the diverse factors that created (and continue to create) O'Connor's literary legacy, while observing how that legacy shapes our assumptions as we read O'Connor's past artistic accomplishments in the present. Through a dexterous mining of vast and diverse sources, Moran demonstrates his caveat-cum-thesis that O'Connor's place in the American literary pantheon was not a fait accompli. He begins by pairing her fiction with its critical reception. Here Wise Blood stands as prime exemplar, as its first two releases—ten years apart—allow open space wherein Moran tussles with sources ranging from critical reviews to cover designs. Later chapters expand this open space further still, illuminating the growth of "the increasingly widening lens through which O'Connor's fiction was being viewed" (p. 100). Along the way, Moran details the subtle ironies of her literary ascendency, noting with some satisfaction when critics posthumously praise O'Connor for the very things they castigated her for during her lifetime. Moran commands an extraordinary volume of critical reviews, spanning a remarkable historical scope. What impresses the reader even more is his selection of sources beyond the literary critical establishment. To tell his creation narrative, he includes, alongside the published criticism, interviews and letters to the editor, press releases and publication notices, personal correspondence and perm requests, thank-you notes and fan mail, award speeches and civic proclamations, actor interviews and film trailers. The work on Robert Giroux's editorial advocacy in chapter 4 is an especially valuable contribution, allowing the reader to see how the marketing, perming, reprinting, anthologizing, and even posthumous publication of O'Connor was a consciously curated literary legacy. Further, his exploration of the radical democratization of criticism in online forums and "social reading sites" (p. 164) breaks new ground in O'Connor studies. Though the content of O'Connor's Catholic faith is not probed in great detail (readers eager for this treatment can find excellent works by Ralph C. Wood, Susan Srigley, Paul Elie, and Farrell O'Gorman, among others), Moran devotes the entirety of chapter 2 to detailing how her audience (readers as well as critics) became capable of understanding its significance. Moran thus weighs in on the critical divide over the relationship between O'Connor's (more explicitly theological) nonfiction writings to her fiction in a new way through his portrait of O'Connor as an incontrovertibly "Catholic writer," whether or not her faith may be taken as the interpretive key to the meaning of her work. Throughout this handsome monograph Moran charts a course, giving us "signposts" (p. 49) to mark not only the evolving understanding of O'Connor's genius but also the active "building of her literary reputation" (p. 43). Happily, he also minds the places...

Mom and Dad will hate me: the ethics of writing about family in memoir-fiction

ABSTRACTWriting about one’s family, regardless of whether the family is represented in fiction or nonfiction, is oftentimes a cathartic experience for the writer. However, doing so can also intensify tumultuous family relationships, create libel and character defamation lawsuits, and result in family estrangement. Thus, many novelists, memoirists, and nonfiction writers alike struggle with genre labels and restrictions, causing them to censor their content. This censoring makes the truthfulness of their work suffer, which is doubly problematic. By examining the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard, Erica Jong, Jeffrey Eugenides, Augusten Burroughs, and other writers whose work dares to cross the genre lines of memoir versus fiction, I explore why the act of challenging these ‘life-writing’ genres is so problematic for both the writer and the reader. I also examine why life-writers, who search for authorial truth and narrative believability, often find themselves estranged from their families if they achieve literary success and personal catharsis.

Law and Race in George Orwell

As Eric Blair, the young George Orwell served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1929, a time of growing Burmese discontent with British rule. He wrote about Burma in a novel, Burmese Days, and a number of non-fictional writings. This article considers the nature of the law-and-order regime Orwell served in Burma, especially in the light of racial self-interest and Britain's commitment to the principle of the rule of law, and traces the issues of race and the law to his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It is the truth that is therapeutic: a conversation with James Janko, author of Buffalo Boy and Geronimo

ABSTRACTThis narrative perspective describes a dialog that occurred over email and in person between the author of the novel Buffalo Boy and Geronimo and a nonfiction writer and therapist interested in the therapeutic aspects of writing. The novel derives from James Janko’s experiences in Viet Nam, as a medic in the army and much later, as a person trying to understand and reclaim his earlier experiences of the land. The language of therapy falls short in describing how writing this moving and beautiful novel impacted the life of the author, but in retrospect he does see a therapeutic value of his writing.

The Rosarium Project

Purpose This paper aims to describe the Rosarium Project, a digital humanities project being undertaken at the Phillips Memorial Library + Commons of Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. The project focuses on a collection of English language non-fiction writings about the genus Rosa. The collection will comprise books, pamphlets, catalogs and articles from popular magazines, scholarly journals and newspapers written on the rose published before 1923. The source material is being encoded using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium’s P5 guidelines and the extensible markup language (XML) editor software <oXygen/>. Design/methodology/approach This paper outlines the Rosarium Project and describes its workflow. This paper demonstrates how to create TEI-encoded files for digital curation using the XML editing software <oXygen/> and the TEI Archiving Publishing and Access Service (TAPAS) Project. The paper provides information on the purpose, scope, audience and phases of the project. It also identifies the resources – hardware, software and membership – needed for undertaking such a project. Findings This paper shows how straightforward it is to encode transcriptions of primary sources using the TEI and XML editing software and to make the resulting digital resources available on the Web. Originality/value This paper presents a case study of how a research project transitioned from traditional printed bibliography to a web-accessible resource by capitalizing on the tools in the TEI toolkit using specialized XML editing software. The details of the project can be a guide for librarians and researchers contemplating digitally curating primary resources and making them available on the Web.

In the Convoy and Alongside It: A Study of S. Yizhar’s Works on Education and Literature

During his years of silence, S. Yizhar, one of the canonical writers of Modern Hebrew literature, published six books of non-fiction and numerous articles. These writings, which deal mainly with education and literature, are barely mentioned in the diverse and extensive research on Yizhar, which focuses on his fictional works. Through an investigation of his non-fictional writings, this article will seek to shed new light on Yizhar’s position as a cultural critic and on a central issue in his works in general: the tension between the individual and society. The article will suggest three main arguments: 1) There is a significant parallelism between Yizhar’s view on education and his view on literature — namely, just as the internal world of the individual student is constantly threatened by outer forces, so, too, a work of fiction is threatened constantly from without by critics, academic researchers, etc; 2) His claims and the nature of his analysis testify to the fact that he perceives society as an uncontrollable entity that can be neither changed nor understood; 3) Yizhar’s perception of society (and, accordingly, his relation to it) is more complex than what seems to be reflected in his fictional works, at least according to the common readings of them. Yizhar’s world contains not only a vast and impenetrable social framework, but also an interpersonal and intimate sphere, and the distinction between the two is at the foundation of all of his thinking.

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

The problem of “culture” in the process of intercultural understanding

The problem of in the process of intercultural understanding is one of the most discussed issues among scholars today. Anthropologists, linguists, literary critics, and philosophers, just to name a few, study this issue using a problem-based and research format. Culture and cultural understanding are hereby presented by demonstrating studies and observations of two cultural anthropologists, R. H. Robbins and Clifford Geertz, a literary critic, Lionel Trilling, and C. S. Lewis, a famous writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Our intention here is to answer the question: how to describe and analyze a culture that is so different from the perspective of our own? In this sense, language and discourse are also analyzed in this paper as part of culture and can indicate some of our own moral perspectives and judgments on others' cultures.

‘Savage times come again’: Morel, Wells, and the African Soldier, c.1885–1920

The African soldier trained in western combat was a figure of fear and revulsion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My article examines representations of African soldiers in nonfictional writings by E.D. Morel about the Congo Free State (1885–1908), the same author’s reportage on African troops in post-First World War Germany, and H.G. Wells’s speculative fiction When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, 1910). In each text racist and anti-colonialist discourses converge in representing the African soldier as the henchman of corrupt imperialism. His alleged propensity for taboo crimes of cannibalism and rape are conceived as threats to white safety and indeed supremacy. By tracing Wells’s connections to the Congo reform campaign and situating his novel between two phases of Morel’s writing career, I interpret When the Sleeper Wakes as neither simply a reflection of past events in Africa or as a prediction of future ones in Europe. It is rather a transcultural text which reveals the impact of European culture upon the ‘Congo atrocities’, and the inscription of this controversy upon European popular cultural forms and social debates.

Notes From the Field

Notes From the Field

Two Poems

58 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2016 A Swap At the market bus stop I’m waiting with a man in ragged clothes, unshaven, his hair greasy, swinging his hand holding a big plastic bag with “The Big Shopper” written on it. Why did I smile, why did I bite my lip? The corners of my canvas shopping bag heavy with fruit and vegetables are nearly touching the ground. “Shall we swap bags?” He deliberates, scratches himself behind the ear, mumbling something incomprehensible. His bus arrives. He suddenly grabs my bag, leaving his own on the ground for me. Here’s my bus now. I try to lift the bag, but suddenly it’s too heavy, beyond measure. This is how heavy Saint Philothea was when as a thin girl she died for Christ and nobody could lift her off the ground. I strain hard to lift it but haven’t the strength. I open it and in it – a sparrow with eyes rolled back cooped up at the bottom as if in a vault. Why is it that everything that has been and has passed is heavy only in death which “The Big Shopper” can’t pay off? And all that will be and will pass is heavy only in the life of the one who will return my bag to God. Without Me Like the automatic door on a train my life closed. Strangers remained on the platform, but they each knew who they were waving to. In the carriages – suitcases, hubbub, passengers with their feet on the seats. And one booked seat, by the window, which everyone was eyeing from the corridor. In the distance an old woman in black running for the train. She fell exhausted on the grass and the train left without her. I pulled the red emergency brake. The conductor crashed into me. I pushed the door open and jumped out. The train whistled, a shadow loomed through the windows. The old woman in black was nowhere to be seen. And my life left without me. Translations from the Macedonian By Ljubica Arsovska & Patricia Marsh Editorial note: From ЦРНО НА БЕЛО (In black and white) (Skopje; Ili-Ili, 2016) Ljubica Arsovska is editor in chief of the long-established Skopje cultural magazine Kulturen Život and a distinguished literary translator from English into Macedonian and vice versa. Her published translations include more than twenty books and plays as well as poems and collected poems by Macedonian poets published in Macedonia and abroad. Patricia Marsh is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, author of The Scribe of the Soul and The Enigma of the Margate Shell Grotto, and translator of a number of plays and poems from Macedonian into English. She lectured in English at the University of Skopje for a long period before returning to live and work in the UK in 1992. Two Poems by Lidija Dimkovska poetry ...

Two Poems

58 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2016 A Swap At the market bus stop I’m waiting with a man in ragged clothes, unshaven, his hair greasy, swinging his hand holding a big plastic bag with “The Big Shopper” written on it. Why did I smile, why did I bite my lip? The corners of my canvas shopping bag heavy with fruit and vegetables are nearly touching the ground. “Shall we swap bags?” He deliberates, scratches himself behind the ear, mumbling something incomprehensible. His bus arrives. He suddenly grabs my bag, leaving his own on the ground for me. Here’s my bus now. I try to lift the bag, but suddenly it’s too heavy, beyond measure. This is how heavy Saint Philothea was when as a thin girl she died for Christ and nobody could lift her off the ground. I strain hard to lift it but haven’t the strength. I open it and in it – a sparrow with eyes rolled back cooped up at the bottom as if in a vault. Why is it that everything that has been and has passed is heavy only in death which “The Big Shopper” can’t pay off? And all that will be and will pass is heavy only in the life of the one who will return my bag to God. Without Me Like the automatic door on a train my life closed. Strangers remained on the platform, but they each knew who they were waving to. In the carriages – suitcases, hubbub, passengers with their feet on the seats. And one booked seat, by the window, which everyone was eyeing from the corridor. In the distance an old woman in black running for the train. She fell exhausted on the grass and the train left without her. I pulled the red emergency brake. The conductor crashed into me. I pushed the door open and jumped out. The train whistled, a shadow loomed through the windows. The old woman in black was nowhere to be seen. And my life left without me. Translations from the Macedonian By Ljubica Arsovska & Patricia Marsh Editorial note: From ЦРНО НА БЕЛО (In black and white) (Skopje; Ili-Ili, 2016) Ljubica Arsovska is editor in chief of the long-established Skopje cultural magazine Kulturen Život and a distinguished literary translator from English into Macedonian and vice versa. Her published translations include more than twenty books and plays as well as poems and collected poems by Macedonian poets published in Macedonia and abroad. Patricia Marsh is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, author of The Scribe of the Soul and The Enigma of the Margate Shell Grotto, and translator of a number of plays and poems from Macedonian into English. She lectured in English at the University of Skopje for a long period before returning to live and work in the UK in 1992. Two Poems by Lidija Dimkovska poetry ...

“Shipwreck of Faith”: The Religious Vision and Ideas of Wole Soyinka

This article investigates the religious vision and ideas of Wole Soyinka in selected non-fiction writings. While African spirituality is deployed as a literary trope in Soyinka's creative works and dramatic masterpieces such as Death and the King's Horseman and A Dance of the Forests, scholars have given scarce attention to his engagement with religion in his non-fiction productions. To highlight that engagement, first, this article proposes the notions of radical skepticism and religious inclusivism as symbolic markers to describe Soyinka's perspective on religion and his shipwreck of faith. His witness of religious violence and fanaticism in his home country of Nigeria and the host countries outside of his native land has shaped his religious experience and altered his religious vision. To call Wole Soyinka a radical agnostic and religious inclusivist in the humanist tradition is to confront his uneasiness with and ambivalence toward religion that had marked both his adolescent and adult life. Second, it argues that Soyinka's abandonment of his Anglican faith, the “imported religion” of his childhood and Nigerian parents, was a consequence of his re-evaluation of the merits and liberalism of his ancestral faith: the Yoruba religious tradition and spirituality. Third, it contends that Soyinka rejected the Christian faith because of a theological crisis he encountered both as a teenager in Ake (his hometown) and as a student at the University College in Ibadan. The article resituates Soyinka's religious sensibility not in the tradition of the Abrahamic religions but within the religious world view and cultural framework of African indigenous faiths and spirituality. Finally, it presents Wole Soyinka as a religious critic and radical theistic humanist.

A City and World in Miniature: The Scale of Perspective in E. B. White’s Stuart Little

A City and World in Miniature: The Scale of Perspective in E. B. White’s Stuart Little Alethia Shih (bio) There has always been something about the implausible scale of E. B. White’s protagonist Stuart Little that has stretched the limits of believability, even to the author himself. Although the eponymous protagonist of Stuart Little belongs to a human family, he looks “very much like a mouse in every way”—“wearing a gray hat and carrying a small cane,” according to White’s humorously matter-of-fact narrator (1–2). As a result of his unusual size, Stuart embarks on a series of uniquely scaled adventures throughout New York City and the countryside, commandeering toy sailboats in Central Park and flying over the metropolis with a beautiful bird named Margalo. He also engages, however, in tasks that initially appear unsuited to his size: at one point, he even leads an invigorated, authoritative classroom discussion about what it would mean to be Chairman of the World. The at-times random structure of the novel has prompted critics such as Roger Sale to dismiss the book as “terribly bored during many of its episodes” (258); meanwhile, Malcolm Cowley has also observed with disappointment that “the parts of Stuart Little are greater than the whole” (68). Yet, there is a way of understanding how Stuart’s size-based relationship to these episodes creates a narrative of wholeness, one that constantly recalibrates the relationship between scale and value. In the first part of his city adventures, for example, Stuart’s unconventional view of the world brings the loftiness of New York City repeatedly under his microscopic scrutiny. Whether he spends his time examining miniature coins on the bus or admiring model sailboats at Central Park, Stuart’s unique point of view constantly works to transform a sublime (and potentially terrifying) urban encounter into an accessible, aesthetically valuable experience. As the story progresses, Stuart learns to expand his miniature vantage point, adopting the bird’s-eye view of his friend Margalo and traveling through the vast countryside in pursuit of her after she flies away. [End Page 22] These scenes of transformation and rescaled perspective augment White’s interest in the relationships among childhood, fantasy, and the miniature: as Marah Gubar observes, many scholars automatically tend to associate “the trials and tribulations of miniature heroes with the plight of children, who must also navigate a world built to a scale that exceeds their size” (98–99). But whereas White’s protagonist certainly engages the fantastic literary conventions of miniature heroes such as Tom Thumb or Lemuel Gulliver, Stuart’s expanding desire to explore New York, scour the countryside in search of Margalo, and even become a global leader suggest that White conceives of smallness as much more than a metaphor for childhood tribulations. In what follows, I maintain that Stuart’s smallness, together with his global ambition, actually stands in dialogue with the nonfiction prose that White wrote for the New Yorker and other periodicals during World War II and the immediate postwar period (particularly with respect to the formation of the United Nations). Much like the first half of Stuart’s metropolitan adventures, White’s essays on New York City (including his most famous piece, “Here Is New York”) are centrally concerned with perspective and scale in urban space. In a statement that resonates with White’s representations of the city in Stuart Little, he describes New York as a place that is “characterized by physical majesty,” making it the “loftiest of cities” (White, “Here Is New York” 700). White’s nonfiction writings of this period also share a vocabulary that connects the loftiness of New York with a distinctly global perspective. In his 1940s political essays, White refers to New York City as “a world government on a small scale” and discusses the urgent need to create a federalized, cosmopolitan postwar world government (Wild Flag xii). White’s vision of a global federation certainly informs Stuart’s desire to play-act as Chairman of the World, since he is a tiny leader who respects the value of every perspective regardless of the owner’s size or perceived power (Wild Flag xii). If...

Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man: Nabokov's Evolving Body Paradigm

This article explores ways in which Peter Brooks' notions of the semiotization of the body and of the somatization of story may furnish hermeneutic keys to Nabokov's works. It focuses on the latter's non-fictional writings from the 1920s to the 1960s, as well as his novels ­— notably Lolita , Ada and especially The Original of Laura ­—, so as to examine how the paradigms of agon and eros operate in the writer's figuring of the reader and in his elaboration of embodied narratives.

L’infra-ordinaire : esquisse de la théorie narrative de Georges Perec

Georges Perec wrote novels as well as of non-fictional texts, which are precisely the object of this study. Starting from the notion of infra-ordinary conceived as the attentive observation of « what happens every day and repeats every day, what is banal, daily, evident, common, ordinary, infraordinary, background noise, habitual », this article analyses Perec’s critical texts in order to bring out the genealogy of what will become his draft for a narrative theory. By following the ideas developed in his non-fictional writings, the attention given to the details in reality reveals itself as a constant theme that will become a literary theory that combines Perec’s practice and views on literature.

Review: Searching for the truth of book-length journalism

Mason, Bonita. (2015). Searching for the truth of book-length journalism. Pacific Journalism Review, 21(2): 200-203. Review of Telling True Stories: Navigating the challenges of writing narrative non-fiction, by Matthew Ricketson. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2014. 282pp. ISBN 978-1-742379-35-7Australian journalism academic and practitioner Matthew Ricketson’s new book opens with two quotes: one from South African writer Nadine Gordimer on the enduring presence of ‘beauty’ in the quest for truth; the other from US comparative literature professor Peter Brooks on the impossibility of separating our own humanity and imaginations from what we write. Gordimer has also written elsewhere of the writer’s responsibility, as a social being, to take part in their world through their writing—to become ‘more than a writer’ (1985, p. 141). The kind of writing Ricketson seeks to define, and describes, analyses and advocates in this book (much of which is also investigative), comes closest to meeting these roles and responsibilities for the non-fiction writer.