Prose Pieces Research Articles

“Satire” in the Reign of Charles II

c 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2005/10203-0002$10.00 How did readers and theatergoers in the period circa 1660–85 understand “satire” as a genre, mode, concept, or whatever they took it to be? I pose the question because I am convinced that we tend to bring severely distortive knowledge and assumptions to the poems, prose pieces, and plays that constitute Carolean satire. Almost inevitably we think of classical antecedents (Horace, Juvenal) and of a tradition that extends from the time of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer through John Donne and beyond. Naturally we also tend to think in terms of John Dryden’s foundational history and definition in his 1693 “Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire.” We may or may not refrain from invoking the concept of “Augustan satire” as it has come down to us from Ian Jack, Maynard Mack, Robert C. Elliott, Alvin B. Kernan, Ronald Paulson, and others—excellent and important scholarship, all of it, but heavily influenced by concern with Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. I am focusing on the quartercentury arbitrarily delimited by the reign of Charles II because broad reading has convinced me that the actual practice of satire changed quite a lot in mid-century and again after the revolution of 1688. There are few studies concentrating on the period at issue. Rose Zimbardo’s 1998 book on satire in “Restoration England,” for example, covers not only the 1690s but A Tale of a Tub. I am going to argue that our easy lumping together of Carolean and later writing is bad methodology—and is seriously misleading in its results. Carolean satire should not be classified as a part of the so-called Augustan satire. I am also going to argue that although “satire” unquestionably exists in at least a small number of Carolean plays, the problems of dealing with satiric verse and prose are significantly different from those we encounter in satiric drama of the time. This essay presents, in short, an attempt at historicist reconstruction of contemporary readers’ understanding of “Satire” in the Reign of Charles II

The Organon of Humiliation in Hanoch Levin's Narrative Fiction—The Case of איש עומד מאחורי אשר יושבת (A Man Standing Behind a Seated Woman)

While Hanoch Levin's dramatic works have received, and rightly so, cosiderable critical attention, his prose works have earned (relatively) scant critical analyis. This paper attempts to analyse Hanoch Levin's second and last collection of prose pieces— איש עומד מאחורי אשר יושב (A man standing behind a seated woman)—in which some of the traits characteristic of his prose have reached their consummate realization. In particular, it attempts to crack the code of Levin's chilling art of humiliation, which, in the words of Emily Dickinson, can never be met, whether one is "Attended or alone/Without a tighter breathing/And zero at the bone." While focusing on the elaborate, ever so viciously subtle artifice of humiliation, the article also deals with the effect of the text on the reader, and towards the end hints at the possible cathartic effect that this weave of darkness, this locus of utter negativity, devoid of any shred of grace, might hold for the reader engulfed by its black power.

The case of Robert Walser (1878-1956).

Robert Walser (1878-1956), one of the great literary geniuses of 20th century German literature, was also one of the most mysterious writers of his time. Born in Switzerland in 1878 he was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 50 and spent the remaining two and a half decades of his life in Swiss psychiatric hospitals until his death in 1956. His literary legacy consists of four novels, numerous pieces of short prose (essays and stories) as well as 526 pages of pencil notes written in minuscule script, the famous 'micro-gramms'. Although highly unsuccessful during his lifetime and leading the life of an artist on the margins of society, his writings have been linked to Kleist, Kafka, Joyce and Beckett. The silencing of Walser's unique voice by mental illness and his disappearance behind the walls of psychiatric hospitals has been considered a tragedy and over the years doubts were raised about the true nature of his illness.

The Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism, and Politics in Mallarme (review)

Reviewed by: The Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism, and Politics in Mallarmé Pamela A. Genova Catani, Damian. The Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism, and Politics in Mallarmé. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Pp. 284. ISBN0-8204-5777-9 In The Poet and Society: Art, Consumerism, and Politics in Mallarmé, Damian Catani endeavors to reveal a Stéphane Mallarmé quite unlike the now mythical image of the Absolute Poet whose ghost seems to float, unhindered by social or political concerns, at the very highest levels of the Occidental cultural imaginary. Catani argues that instead of inhabiting the hermetic ivory tower of impossible poetic perfection, Mallarmé in fact was quite aware of issues of political and economic reality. The author refers throughout his study to Mallarmé as "socially egalitarian," and advances an understanding of the poet schoolteacher as a man who recognizes the positive impact of the commercialization and democratization of literature, and whose fundamental conception of aesthetics is at core non-hierarchical and anti-elitist, while his ideological position in the relationship - more often the conflict - between art and life can be described as a form of social commitment. While such an approach may seem at first surprising, particularly to the readers of Mallarmé's notoriously difficult, even esoteric sonnets and other pieces in verse, there is of course a critical history, dating even from before Mallarmé's death in 1898, that has striven to unveil, ironically perhaps, a Mallarmé more complex than the simple conception of embodying a complicated poet. Yet while Catani recognizes the analyses carried out by such figures as Jacques Rancière and the, in my view, acutely keen Bertrand Marchal, particularly in their efforts to contextualize Mallarmé's entire œuvre in a more inclusive light, highlighting his diverse and subtle work in prose and rethinking the cultural aura in which he wrote, Catani argues that critics such as these still neglect the economic and political pressures involved in the poet's literary production, pressures that, for Catani, actually serve not as obstacles to his work but as reminders of the ways in which the rest of the world operates, as a conduit to the desires and sufferings of la foule. Catani focuses in large part on two periods in Mallarmé's writerly career, first on the articles from the 1870s that the poet published on the London Universal Exhibition as well as his pieces in the 1874 fashion magazine written and edited entirely by Mallarmé alone, La Dernière Mode. Texts such as these reflect, in Catani's view, the work of a journalist curious about the culture of consumerism and the impact of the economic forces of the era. Catani also treats pieces from the 1890s, such as La Musique et les lettres (1894) and Variations sur un sujet (1895), contending that in this [End Page 213] later period Mallarmé's focus shifts to a more general stance on political issues, particularly with regard to the formulation of a socially-inclusive Livre that would necessarily include prose pieces of an apparently more pragmatic nature. Anticipating perhaps some reaction against his view of a politicized Mallarmé, on the part of those who might be tempted to favor for the honor of Political Writer a more flashy rabble-rouser such as Zola, Catani argues that this error lies in misunderstanding Mallarmé's conception of social engagement, unusual in that it is non-ideological, associated with no specific political party or movement. Most engaging is the discussion centering on the dynamics of language in the work of Mallarmé, for Catani refers to the traditional stance in which it is held that Mallarmé aimed to restore to language an original, primitive, and universal function, best exemplified in the notion of le drame solaire, a context in which the human drama of light and darkness, of abandonment and reassurance, offers the names of gods as emblems of these struggles. Going further, then, Catani advances the idea that Mal-larmé's goal was to rediscover in language a means to communicate with the largest possible number of human interlocutors, unfettering language from specific usage or context, opening it to deep meanings shared by us all. And, suggests the author, every...

‘Für eine aufmerksamere und nachdenklichere Welt’: Beiträge zu Marie Luise Kaschnitz ed. by Dirk Göttsche (review)

842 Reviews examples are from Britain than from North America. For the United States Feiwel Kupferberg presents an extremely short paper on German-speaking refugees in the American film industry; Nick Warr, in his paper on Siegfried Kracauer's 'extraterritorial critique', suggests reasons why the wider work ofthe famous author of modern film studies is neglected despite his troubled move to America; and David Kettler's 'Self-Knowledge and Sociology; Nina Rubinstein's Studies in Exile' examines the ambiguous conjunction of autobiography and sociological theory in her work. Thereafter the case studies tend to be British. Dorothea McEwan maps the trade routes of the mind through the example of the Warburg Institute in London; Johannes Feichtinger discusses the significance of Austrian emigre art historians for English art scholarship; and Charlotte Benton highlights refugee and emigre architects in Britain from 1933 to 1939. Other papers focus, for example, on Gaby Schreiber in exile in England as a remarkably successful exponent of Bauhaus principles in her vast design consultancy; on the Wiener Kreis in Britain; on Austrian motifs in Wittgenstein 's later works; and on child psychology and the Hampstead Nursery. The paper by Andrea Hammel on German-Jewish women writers and their texts is the only one devoted to exile literature, though the cultural alienation of German writers in Hollywood is brieflymentioned in Kupferberg's paper. Though not literary figures as such, Franz Borkenau and Sebastian Haffner are singled out in another paper as the most successful political writers to make the cultural and intellectual transfer from the German to the English scene. This book is the outcome of a conference at the University of Sussex in September 2000. Almost inevitably there is some unevenness in the quality and scope of the papers. Some are extremely technical and theoretical, while others are short and gen? eral. Some have extensive notes and bibliographies, while others have hardly any of either. Nevertheless, the range of the work analysed makes this volume an invaluable extension of the scope of Exile Studies. Institute of Germanic Studies, London J.M. Ritchie 'Fiir eineaufmerksamereund nachdenklichere Welt': Beitrage zu Marie Luise Kaschnitz. Ed. by Dirk Gottsche. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler. 2001. 220 pp. ?28. ISBN 3-476-45274-3 (pbk). This volume, born out of a conference to celebrate what would have been Marie Luise Kaschnitz's hundredth birthday, seeks to rescue the writer from relative obscurity. Kaschnitz won almost all the literary prizes of the Bundesrepublik, including the Buchner Prize (1955), and her significance was compared in 1973, in a Handbuch edited by Benno von Wiese, to that of Ingeborg Bachmann. However, the comparison is instructive. While Bachmann has seemed to become increasingly contemporary, Kaschnitz was bypassed by the feminist movement in the 1980s (probably on account of her conservative notions of gender) and has been enthroned as the grand old lady of German letters. With that, however, comes what Brecht called the 'impotence of the classic'. This volume attempts to dust offthe cobwebs and argue forher pivotal position 'be? tween tradition und modernity'. It includes Kaschnitz specialists (Johannes Ostbo, Nikola Rossbach, Uwe Schweikert, Helga Vetter) as well as academies from other fields who bring their own interests to bear. The volume is divided into three sections. Given Kaschnitz's famous declaration in the 1945 essay 'Menschen und Dinge', 'Beginnen wir wieder mit dem Wort Ich', the firstpart concentrates on aspects ofthe auto? biographical, with detailed appraisals ofthe diaries (Vetter), formsofself-presentation (Schweiket), autobiographical sketches (Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Rossbach), and a MLR, 99.3, 2004 843 focus on autobiographical places (Ernst Ribbat). Fascinating here is the use made of the newly published Tagebiicher 1936-1966 (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 2000). The second section offersvarious perspectives on individual works or genres. Two pieces deal with short stories: Gottsche himself offersa sensitive analysis of the modernity of short prose pieces throughout her career, and Ostbo examines configurations ofnarra? tive voice against the backdrop of theories of 'Kurzprosa'. In a detailed piece Ludwig Volker analyses Kaschnitz's response to death in her poetry,focusing particularly on a number of characteristic motifs,while Hubert Ohl offersa fascinating insight into the poet Peter Huchel's role as editor of the idiosyncratic volume...

Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenen Ich: Wolf gang Koeppens Spätwerk by Matthias Kussmann (review)

MLRy 99.1, 2004 259 years in exile. Pfemfertand his wife Alexandra Ramm were forced to flee Germany in 1933. They found refuge firstin Karlsbad, then in Paris, and finally in Mexico City, where Pfemfert managed to eke out a tenuous existence as a photographer, a trade he had been taught by Thea Sternheim. The volume Pfemfert: Erinnerungen und Abrechnungen fails into three parts. There are excellent introductory essays by the two editors. Also included are twenty-two per? sonal reminiscences of Pfemfert by friends and collaborators, most of whom formed part of a radio tribute to Die Aktion, broadcast by Westdeutscher Rundfunk in 1960. However, the main body of the book consists of Pfemfert's letters to such friends as Rudolf Rocker, Ruth Fischer, and Karl Otten, together with a handful of letters written to him. It comprises 220 of Pfemfert's letters, virtually all previously unpub? lished, beginning in 1909 and continuing to his death in 1954, forming an oblique biographical record. Letters from the period before 1933 are less numerous: Pfem? fert's extensive archive was impounded by the Nazis and has never resurfaced. Pfemfertand his wife shunned the company of other (mainly Communist) exiles in Mexico City,to whom they were suspect on account of their syndicalist and Trotskyist sympathies. Alexandra Ramm had been Trotsky's German translator; his widow remained one of their few friends in Mexico City. The couple were consequently in even greater danger from the Soviet secret service than from Nazi agents. Otten re-established contact with Pfemfert after reading of his seventieth birthday in the New York exile journal Aufbau, and the two men thereafter exchanged letters regularly. Unbalanced by the stresses of exile, Pfemfert finally slipped into paranoia. His last letters to Otten concern the 'murder' of his beloved cat Katju by a local vet: 'Die groBte Tragodie, die uns seit 1933 traf. In her foreword Ellen Otten, who had to read these letters to her blind husband, remarks: 'Mir blieb das Vorlesen dieser Briefe unvergeBlich.' Pfemfertis carefully edited, including useful explanatory notes on places and per? sons, as well as a comprehensive index. Pfemfert's own photographs from the 1920s and 1930s, among them portraits of Andre Gide, Karl Kraus, Frans Masereel, and Gottfried Benn, are a striking embellishment to the book. University of Greenwich Richard Dove Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenenIch: WolfgangKoeppens Spdtwerk. By Matthias Kussmann. (Epistemata: Reihe Literaturwissenschaft, 363) Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann. 2001. 213 pp. ?30. ISBN 3-8260-2084-7 (pbk). This splendidly efficientand eminently readable Karlsruhe dissertation (2000) deals with Wolfgang Koeppen's later works starting with Jugend (1976) and repeatedly points out that Koeppen, stereotyped as 'der groBe Schweiger' after his impressive trilogy of the 1950s, did in fact produce a considerable body of work, albeit largely characterized by deliberately fragmentary form and content. This the author sets out in his introduction (pp. 9-23), dividing the ceuvre into three phases (pp. 10-13). In the firsttwo phases, 1923-35 and 1948 to the mid-1960s, Koeppen wrote novels and some pieces on travel, originally commissioned for the wireless. From the late 1960s until his death in 1996, there followed a new direction in his work when he ceased writing novels. This third phase saw short and seemingly incomplete pieces of prose which were intensely concerned with self-reflection and strongly autobiographical in substance but, according to Kussmann, should not necessarily be categorized within the context of 'neue Innerlichkeit', which they partly pre-date. Koeppen's apparent aversion to politically concerned texts dates, it seems, from the 1960s, as evidenced by his rejection of Hans Magnus Enzenberger's offerto collaborate on Kursbuch. If 260 Reviews Weggefdhrtenare required, the author points to the works especially of Elias Canetti, but also of Thomas Bernhard, and perhaps Max Frisch and Peter Handke. Noting that research hitherto has largely concentrated on the three novels of the 1950s, Kussmann presents his own monograph as the firstcomprehensive study of Koeppen's 'Spatwerk' (p. 22). He properly rejects the application of fashionable and transient methods which often use literary texts to transport various aesthetic and anthropological concerns; instead, he wishes to produce close readings of Koeppen's short narratives, fragments...

THE NARRATIVE ETHICS OF LEOPOLD'SSAND COUNTY ALMANAC

Although philosophers often focus on the essays of Leopold's Sand County Almanac, especially Land Ethic, there is also a normative argument present in the stories that comprise most of the book. In fact the shack stories may be more persuasive, with a subtlety and complexity not available in his prose piece. This paper develops a narrative ethics methodology gleaned from rhetoric theory, and current interest in narrative ethics among literary theorists, in order to discern the normative underpinnings of the stories in Part 1. The narrative ethics approach sidesteps the need to ground the land ethic in ethical theory-which has been a reconstructive and problematic task for the philosophical interpreters of Leopold-and suggests, instead, that it emerges in Leopold's very effort to narrate his, professional, personal, and practical experience with nature. The involves examining the stories in terms of their emotional, logical and performative aspects. The result is an analysis that shows not only how these stories express normative claims, but also justify them. One conclusion of the analyses is that, in the narratives, there is less emphasis on the problematic notion of an over-arching community than in the prose pieces, and more emphasis on the metaphor of other living things as fellow travelers in the odyssey of evolution. Second, the narratives take on an ironic attitude toward the ecological order, less discernable in the prose essays. The order itself may not be ethically admirable, but should be preserved since it makes possible any ethical relations within it. Thus, the narrative reading suggests some temperance to the usual holistic interpretation of his land ethic and its concomitant criticisms especially the charge of ecofacism. We should not take the land ethic imperative at its face value, in the sense that the good of the order itself is an intrinsic good. In the narratives, individuals are shown not merely to be means to the ecological whole, but the focus of sympathy and concern, in a manner that demands their good should also be an object of moral consideration.

Jane Welsh Carlyle: imaginary letters and ghost publications

This article considers Jane Welsh Carlyle's writing (all unpublished in her lifetime) under the metaphors of “Imaginary Letters”, which refers mainly to her prose pieces, Notebook, 1845–52, and Journal, 1855–56, and of “Ghost Publications” which refers both to her oral narratives, reported by others, and her letters, both of which gave rise to her reputation with Dickens and others as a “missing novelist”. The article interrogates this idea, presenting her as a writer who chose not to be a novelist but who, in her unpublished life-writing, provides ample evidence of her success as a writer: satirist and social commentator as well as unrivalled storyteller. It also touches on the problems of assessing a “private” writer such as Welsh Carlyle in contrast with the public writing career of Thomas Carlyle.

Who Commissioned The Little Review's "In Our Time?"

xBiographers have always credited Jane Heap with commissioning Hemingway's contribution to The Little Review's "Exiles" issue (Spring 1923). But much evidence points to Ezra Pound, coeditor of the magazine and Hemingway's mentor in modernism at the time. This commission, eliciting the first glimmers of the "Hemingway style" in six experimental prose pieces, fed into Pound's commission of a short book for his "Inquest" series, which produced Hemingway's in our time. Together, the two commissions show how decisively Pound influenced Hemingway's style and identity as an avant-garde writer.

Die Kunst des Verrats: Der Prenzlauer Berg und die Staatssicherheit by Alison Lewis (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 843 focus on autobiographical places (Ernst Ribbat). Fascinating here is the use made of the newly published Tagebiicher 1936-1966 (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 2000). The second section offersvarious perspectives on individual works or genres. Two pieces deal with short stories: Gottsche himself offersa sensitive analysis of the modernity of short prose pieces throughout her career, and Ostbo examines configurations ofnarra? tive voice against the backdrop of theories of 'Kurzprosa'. In a detailed piece Ludwig Volker analyses Kaschnitz's response to death in her poetry,focusing particularly on a number of characteristic motifs,while Hubert Ohl offersa fascinating insight into the poet Peter Huchel's role as editor of the idiosyncratic volume of her Gedichte (1975), showing how clearly he brought out her radical edge and (although Ohl does not say this) how much sharper he was in editing Kaschnitz's work than she herself was. Much ofthe volume concentrates inevitably on the short stories, covering a fairrange of material, but an interesting piece by Ulrike Schlieper also brings Kaschnitz's large output of 'Horspiele' into focus. A final section of 'discursive constellations' contains Monika Albrecht's spirited attempt to read against the grain of Kaschnitz's concept of gender identity and some unpublished correspondence introduced by Renate Knoll. One of the drawbacks of a volume composed like this is a certain amount of inevitable overlap. It might also have been interesting to see more pieces which took on and compared work from various genres, as a good deal ofthe theoretical background to the short story form which appears here will be familiar to readers from elsewhere. However, out of these same aspects come certain interesting effects.The presentation of childhood comes to the fore in a number of pieces, with the fine prose text Haus der Kindheit (1956) as a kind of touchstone for the volume as a whole. A number of pieces set out to uncover the fractures and slippages beneath the surface of her work. Respondingto a questionnaire in 1964 Kaschnitz claimed: 'Kunstlerische Wahrheit ist Treue zu sich selbst und zu seiner Zeit'. Kaschnitz's diligent mining of her own experience in her fictional form is well-worked ground, but one of the strongest argu? ments to emerge from the volume as a whole is her commitment to her own time, her 'Zeitgenossenschaft' (Gottsche), and her attempt to make writing active in bringing about a more humane world. This volume will be invaluable in bringing her work to a wider, and perhaps a new, audience. New College, Oxford Karen Leeder Die Kunst des Verrats: Der Prenzlauer Berg und die Staatssicherheit. By Alison Lewis. Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann. 2002. 272 pp. ?36. ISBN 38260 -2487-7 (pbk). Since the opening ofthe Stasi filesthere has been no shortage of articles and books on the influence of this insidious state organ on various social groups. Many ofthe studies published in the early 1990s, however, tended to offerrather black and white images of the formerGDR, sacrificing historical objectivitytoan understandable sense ofmoral outrage. Indeed, such images persist in a number of recent high-profile works such as Anna Funder's Stasiland (London: Granta, 2003). Die Kunst des Verrats provides an excellent and timely corrective to these accounts, subtly exploring the relationship between the GDR's Ministeriumfiir Staatssicherheit and the 'underground' artists of the Prenzlauer Berg scene. Focusing largely on the roles of Sascha Anderson and Rainer Schedlinski, the Stasi's two key Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter in the Prenzlauer Berg, Lewis examines the development of the organization's involvement in the GDR's alternative culture. Particularly fascinating is her account ofthe confusing and at times paradoxical rela? tionship both men, but in particular Anderson, had with the MfS. Anderson's entire 844 Reviews file,much of which has only just become available, is analysed in conjunction with his recently published, and controversial, autobiography, Sascha Anderson (Cologne: DuMont , 2002). On the one hand, Lewis highlights the ways in which Anderson's Stasi handlers manipulated him in an attempt to depoliticize all aspects of the scene, from its illegal readings and samizdat magazines to its contact with West German journal? ists and publishing houses. We learn, for example, how Anderson was encouraged to...

Dauka Puran (review)

The publication of Subramani's Dauka Puran is an important event in the literary and cultural history of the Indo-Fijian community in particular, and of Fiji in general. At over five hundred pages, the novel may also be the longest piece of sustained prose in a vernacular language in the entire written literature of the Pacific Islands. This is no mean achievement. That it is written by a scholar and teacher of English literature makes that achievement even more remarkable (I have vivid memories of Subramani introducing us in Labasa Secondary School to Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, T S Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Hamlet's soliloquies).

The Narrative Ethics of Leopold's Sand County Almanac

Although philosophers often focus on the essays of Leopold's Sand County Almanac, especially "The Land Ethic," there is also a normative argument present in the stories that comprise most of the book. In fact the shack stories may be more persuasive, with a subtlety and complexity not available in his prose piece. This paper develops a narrative ethics methodology gleaned from rhetoric theory, and current interest in narrative ethics among literary theorists, in order to discern the normative underpinnings of the stories in Part 1. The narrative ethics approach sidesteps the need to ground the land ethic in ethical theory—which has been a reconstructive and problematic task for the philosophical interpreters of Leopold—and suggests, instead, that it emerges in Leopold's very effort to narrate his, professional, personal, and practical experience with nature. The involves examining the stories in terms of their emotional, logical and performative aspects. The result is an analysis that shows not only how these stories express normative claims, but also justify them. One conclusion of the analyses is that, in the narratives, there is less emphasis on the problematic notion of an over-arching "community" than in the prose pieces, and more emphasis on the metaphor of other living things as "fellow travelers" in the "odyssey of evolution." Second, the narratives take on an ironic attitude toward the ecological order, less discernable in the prose essays. The order itself may not be ethically admirable, but should be preserved since it makes possible any ethical relations within it. Thus, the narrative reading suggests some temperance to the usual holistic interpretation of his land ethic and its concomitant criticisms especially the charge of ecofacism. We should not take the land ethic imperative at its face value, in the sense that the good of the order itself is an intrinsic good. In the narratives, individuals are shown not merely to be means to the ecological whole, but the focus of sympathy and concern, in a manner that demands their good should also be an object of moral consideration.

Good Ends in the Audelay Manuscript

ABSTRACT This essay raises the question of how far John Audelay, a fifteenth-century poet claiming to be blind and deaf, had a role in the making of the Audelay MS (Bodleian MS Douce 302). The differing responsibilities of two scribes, the ordering of contents, the instructional verses, and the embedded attributions to Audelay suggest his direct involvement. All four sections of the manuscript close decisively, and a farewell poem from Audelay has been appended by the second scribe. These endings match Audelay's dominant concern with preaching penance and living a penitential life. Ending well merges with the priest-poet's avowed petition for a good spiritual end. The circumstances behind the making of the Audelay Manuscript are something of a puzzle. This book, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302, holds all the known verse of John Audelay, an ascription one can hardly avoid for the poet signs many pieces by inserting stanzas about himself, old 'blynd Awdelay'. Beyond these signatures, there is a scribal colophon that names Audelay and records a date and place: 1426, Haughmond Abbey (Shropshire). Altogether, the manuscript preserves Audelay's name eighteen times, and many of these namings occur because the chaplain-poet himself adopts a first-person admonitive mode by which to assert that the verses are his 'making'. In a piece copied at the end of the manuscript, he extends the claim by naming the whole book as his product: 'Loke in [thorn]is book; here may ze se | Hwatt ys my wyl and my wrytyng' (W55.33-34; item 85). (1) Without any other considerations, these declarations make MS Douce 302 a volume of singular interest. It is, by all appearances, an early English author collection devised by the author himself. Moreover, the ubiquity of Audelay's signatures forces a reader to be ever aware of his authorial presence and to acknowledge both his name and his infirmities. The puzzle of the book lies in these same facts, for, if we are to believe literally Audelay's own statements, the poet is blind and deaf, old and sick. One can hardly imagine an aged Helen Keller-as-medieval-monastic--that is, a secular priest retired in old age to a cloistered setting and wholly failed in eyesight and hearing--being able to communicate well enough to supervise the gathering of his verse into a book. Yet the verse declares, in its existence and its claims, that a radically handicapped poet composed a large body of poetry in many verse forms, some based closely on models and antecedents, and that he gathered it in a book. How can this have occurred? What tends to creep into discussions of Audelay is an implicit disbelief that he was incapacitated as fully as his own words attest. (2) My pursuit of this mystery by examination of neglected manuscript clues leads me to agree that Audelay must not have lost both hearing and sight in totality because it seems certain that, besides having written much verse during his affliction, he took an active role in producing MS Douce 302. Beyond being a poet both disabled and prolific, Audelay demonstrates proficiency as the planner of an anthology. While one need not question the poet's own testimony that he suffered the ravages of age, it is important also to recognize that the chaplain gains pious capital from these afflictions as he carves out a distinctive identity in verse as the blind and deaf organ of God, and that the book taken as a whole enacts for Audelay a priestly mission on behalf of his own soul and the souls of his readers. Readers of the book are asked, in a typical petition, 'To pray for hym specialy | That hyt made zour soules to saue, | Jon, [thorn]e blynde Awdelay' (W55.46-48). Plain and unassuming, MS Douce 302 comprises thirty-five vellum leaves measuring 195 x 267 mm. The manuscript has suffered losses, maybe as many as nineteen leaves before the first folio and five more internally. (3) The book that survives holds a collection of sixty-two Middle English poems mostly on standard religious topics, along with two pieces in prose and nine instructional lyrics to guide the reader. …

After the GDR: New Perspectives on the Old GDR and the Young Länder ed. by Laurence McFalls, Lothar Probst (review)

246 Reviews remain firmlyand stubbornly rooted in the poet's intense German. By that I do not mean an obvious mistranslation such as the title 'Cologne, At the Station' (in 'Koln, Am Hof', 'Am Hof' is the name ofa small street near the cathedral and is not to be confused with 'Bahnhof'; the reference points to biographical information which is only partially clear). Rather, the expression 'one of | their painted lingos' (from 'eine | ihrer bebilderten Sprachen') seems less a product of poetic licence than a misunderstanding of the import of 'bebildert', coming from 'Bild' ('image' or 'metaphor'). Celan was always suspicious of metaphor, fearing it would displace the realities on which he grounded his writing. Felstiner otherwise follows the drift of the line with 'lingos'; Michael Hamburger translates as 'one | of their be-imaged languages'. In another instance, taken from Celan's speech 'The Meridian', the merits of 'choekabloek' (for 'dicht beieinander', i.e. 'close to one another', 'in closest proximity') are not readily apparent. German tolerates making adverbs into nouns, a feature at once elementary and immediate, as in the statement that the poem 'ceaselessly calls and hauls itself from its Now-no-more back into its Ever-yet'. Although the original appears on the surface to say the 'same' thing, its language is more accessible since it 'speaks' to us more directly, or we are naturally more receptive to it. 'Schon-nicht-mehr' and 'Immer-noch', of course, also do not in this form derive from everyday speech, but they do exude immediacy, and that in turn facilitates understanding. One suspects that more than one translator of Celan's German has absorbed his language so thoroughly?the cadences, syntax, ellipses, fissures, indeed the inherent trauma?that they write English as though it were German. Felstiner avoids this mostly, although his language slips into such a meta-English from time to time, es? pecially in the late poetry and in idiosyncraticor obscure sections of 'The Meridian'. In his preface Felstiner asks wisely: 'why not think of translation as the specific art of loss, and begin from there?' One of the strengths of Felstiner's translations lies less in the lexical precision (although he is mostly accurate and always thoughtful about the process) than in the cadences which he emulates where possible or productive for the new text. This is especially true for the short prose piece 'Conversation in the Mountains', which to my mind is the most successful and impressive textual transfer of the whole volume, the one which both captures the cadences, the syntax, and the urgency of the original and works as an English text in its own right. A translation can virtually never be the final word in mediating a text between cultures . The present translation, while no exception, is likely to open up the landscape of this vital poet for larger audiences, begetting reviews and discussions and making readers ofpoetry more curious about what Celan has to say. And that will continue and broaden awareness begun in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s with Michael Hamburger's important renderings. In fact, it is advisable to keep Hamburger's translations, and others, on the shelf next to Felstiner's. Wilhelm von Humboldt recommended that those without knowledge of the language of an original text should read as many dif? ferent translations of the text as possible to gain a sense of the original. The process is ongoing, without closure. Queen Mary, University of London Leonard Olschner After the GDR: New Perspectives on the Old GDR and the Young Ldnder. Ed. by Laurence McFalls and Lothar Probst. (German Monitor, 54) Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 2001. iv 4-310 pp. $28; ?30. ISBN 90-420-1326-5 (pbk). Like most books based on conference contributions, this collection is a mixed bag, both linguistically (four chapters in German, thirteen in English) and qualitatively. It is divided into four sections dealing with intellectual history, dictatorship and MLRy 98.1, 2003 247 resistance, modes of memory, and politics and political culture. The opening essay by Wolfgang Emmerich provides a very comprehensive overview of the role of East German intellectuals between 1945 and 1998. It is emblematic of the rest of...

Czechs, Sex, Spies and Torture: Slovak Identity as Translation in Vilikovsky's Ever Green is. ..

In 1963, the editors of the Prague publishing house Czechoslovak Writer launched a new series of short prose pieces called "Zivot kolem nás" ("Life Around Us"). The series began with an auspicious choice: a slim volume entitled Laughable Loves, the first work of fiction by the well-known Communist poet Milan Kundera. The series grew steadily over the next several years, and eventually included works by such Czech writers as Josef Skvorecky, Bohumil Hrabal and Ivan Klíma, as well as by a considerable number of Slovak writers. During the eventful "Prague Spring" of 1968, as Czechoslovakia was undergoing widespread reforms, the series published the short-story collection Citova vychova v breznu(Sentimental Education in March), by the Slovak writer Pavel Vilikovsky. The work was praised by a Czech critic for displaying qualities "which we in Bohemia have often valued in Slovak prose—a strong and vital sense of the epic." 1 After the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, most of the leading writers in Prague were driven out of the official cultural scene, and like so much of the 1960s literary scene, the series "Life Around Us" soon came to an end. During the years of Soviet occupation, officially known in Czechoslovakia as "normalization," Vilikovsky was only permitted to publish one book—a detective novel—in Slovakia over the next twenty years. He remained active in the Slovak literary scene as an editor of the literary journal Romboid, and as a translator of some of the most innovative English and American writers, including Woolf and Faulkner, but he withheld his own unorthodox fiction from publication, aware that it would never pass the censors.

Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846-1948 (review)

282 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies onryA Gabrieb Mistral Reader (1993), which contains twelve of the prose pieces offered here as well as a selection of poetic offerings. Scholars will benefit from the interpretive power of the translations , though they will regret the absence of bibliographical data concerning the original sources of the texts. Enthusiasts will most certainly weave between the Spanish and English in order to enhance their enjoyment and undersranding of the pieces. Such individuals would have little to critique in the renderings in English, though on occasion the translations seem slighdy off the mark. Examples of these occurrences include "picaro" as "smart-ass" (6), "el mayor azul" as "an ur-ancient blue" (13), "una dueña en la tierra" as "an inhabiter of the earth" (14) "vicio de la costumbre" as "vice of habituation" (17), "el Niño de Belén" as "the Babe of Bethlehem" (55), "[e]s un misterio al que asiste Dios y tu alma" as "[i]t is a mystery, assisting both God and your own soul" (89), "una lumbre azul" as "a blue shade" (97), and "al alabar" as "while admiring" (112). In contrast, the reproduction of the texts in Spanish is virtually error free with the exception of minor typographical errors such as "viente" instead of "veinte" (38) and "verdadura" instead of "verdadera" (44). One typographical error in English causes an entire phrase to be misunderstood. The Spanish "pediré que me llamen" became "I'll...ask what they call me" instead of "I'll..ask that they call me" (69). For the most part, however, any departure from the Spanish text reflects a concern for ease of comprehension and the natural flow of English. Tapscott has succeeded in combining commonly anthologized and little-known pieces in a powerful bilingual collection that will broaden Mistral's fame and strengthen her reputation as a voice of reason and love. University of Texas Press should be congratulated for continuing to support the endeavors of scholar/translators like Tapscott who are bringing the best of Latin American literature to the attention of the English-speaking world. Cathy L. Jrade Vanderbilt University MuddiedWaters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846-1948 Duke University Press, 2003 By Nancy P. Applebaum This in-depth historical analysis is the result of extensive research and study of the multiple and complex interactions between races, regions and nations as they reveal the privileging of certain racialized regional identities in Colombia and provides detailed information as well as regional maps. The title itself is a play on words referring to the favoring of whiteness over other races, as well as a reference to the name of die town most analyzed, Rio Sucio. While the investigation focuses on the region of Rio Sucio, it does not do so in isolation but rather draws on surrounding villages and other Latin American experiences in its analysis. The book is divided into three distinct sections . The first part investigates the period between 1840 and 1880, presenting the violent confrontations between Liberals and Conservatives and the powerful divisions that continued throughout this era, and, some would say, are continued today. These observations are based on published texts that demonstrate certain racial and sexual stereotypes with respect to Antioquia and Cauca in which Antioquia is the white, pureblooded beauty and Cauca is die dark beast, while stressing the Antioqueño migrations into northern Cauca, or the whitening process, as established dirough both published and archival texts. At the same time, she presents the ambiguous relationships of indigenous peoples in dieir own processes of colonization and politization, destroying the up-down stereotype of traditional colonization. The second part of the book deals with 1886 to 1930, a period also known as the "white republic" and die "Conservative Hegemony" and examines die Regeneration movement which past legislation designed to civilize and incorporate indigenous communities. This legislation was then used by die indigenous communities, at some great cost, to protect their communities in general and landholdings in particular. Also noted in diis section is diat the Constitution of 1886 established a centralist politics which continues to affecr the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 283 Colombian Departments even in...

Modernism's Ghosts

Yeats's Vision Papers, Volume 4 collects The Discoveries of Michael Robartes, a dialogue between Robartes and Owen Aherne, an untitled dialogue on the same topic, and Version B [The Great Wheel and The Twenty-Eight Embodiments], a very early version of the central sections of both versions (1925, 1937) of A Vision. All four of these fugitive prose pieces represent the earliest available attempts by Yeats to begin to make sense of the materials collected in the previous three volumes of Yeats's Vision Papers, the many but still incomplete transcriptions of Yeats's sessions with his young wife, Georgie Hyde Yeats, as he tries to make sense of the various communications, in the form of automatic writing, from the often antic spirits. As becomes clearer every year, the practice of mediumship for Yeats served as an effective model for his own method of poetic composition. This fourth volume completes the publication of all the available materials which went into the work on A Vision. Unfortunately, there are gaps in the record, perhaps due to the sensitivity of the spiritual communications, but what there is here and in the previous volumes makes it crystal clear that Yeats, whatever hesitations and qualifications he often expressed publicly, acted as if his occult beliefs were true. I think that the role of the occult

Sometimes Funny, but Most Times Deadly Serious: Amiri Baraka as Political Satirist

Smash and bludgeon forty-one times a day Tie him to a tree in front of city hail So every one of his victims families and friends Can make Forty-one ass-whipping calls (Baraka, Giuliani 20) During a poetry workshop at the Betty Shabazz Wholistic Retreat Center in the summer of 2000, Amiri Baraka debuted a new satiric poem that he had been working on for a political anthology entitled Keeping Track: 41 Voices, 41 Visions for Amadou Diallo. longstanding tension between New York City Mayor Rudolph and his constituents (some members of the lower class and minorities, especially African Americans) came to a head when the unarmed African emigrant was gunned down by four undercover New York City Police Officers in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building in February 1999. case of mistaken identity, the special Street Crime Unit shot at the defenseless twenty-two-year-old forty-one times, striking him nineteen. Long before the shooting, however, Mayor had been harshly criticized for fostering an atmosphere in which citizens have a right to fear the police, and since, for impatiently mishandling the investigation into the special crime unit whose motto is ironically taken from a Baraka poem, Own the Night. In the poem A Proposal for Giuliani's Disposal in Forty-one Verses Which Are Also Curses, Baraka viciously lampoons Mayor for what many activists and citizens believe to be Giuliani's complicity in the murder of the innocent young man, and the city's strong-armed attack upon the people of New York. Before he read, Baraka joked that soon after he had written the poem cursing Giuliani, the inhumane mayor was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The audience laughed, Baraka chuckled, but given his illustrated knowledge of Yoruba conjure, his belief in the West African concept of Nommo, the power of the word, and his almost four decades of radical activism, Amiri Baraka could have been deadly serious. Baraka's Modest Proposal, unlike eighteenth-century satirist Jonathan Swift's satiric prose piece of the same title, relies heavily upon Juvenalian satire, which the Encyclopedia Britannica defines as any bitter and ironic criticism of contemporary persons and institutions that is filled with personal invective, angry moral indignation, and pessimism. Here's an example: Dog Dick Pus, Ugly wound ... The Bad Breath of Ibis, The Devil's Gas, Criminal G, Successor, R Like the Child Killer, White Death, Black Death, Murder Man, Death Jam, Mayor NAZI Chiller, Insane Killer, Rudy Maniac, Murder Beast, Rudy the Vile, 666, City Hall Hitler, The Ice Man, Killer Rudy, Rudy Death, Rudy The Ripper, Crazy Rudy, Doo Doo De Sade, Grand Dragon of The Apple, Mayor Murderer, Alcalde Diablo ... Serial Assassin. Though quite funny, the poem never allows the reader to forget the tragedy that inspired it. The phrase 41, the number of bullets the police shot at the unarmed African, which recurs in all forty-one verses, stands as a testament to the excessive force that Mayor allowed to be visited upon the people. The reader may laugh, but will forever link Mayor to the murder of innocence. Baraka's contemporary satiric poem, though less sophisticated than his satiric drama of the '60s and '70s, has evolved just as the word warrior himself has evolved, as well as the world and the people for whom he writes. We are no longer embroiled in open racial warfare, as when Dutchman, the first play by Amiri Baraka, then LeRoi Jones, was produced in 1964. Therefore, his contemporary satire has to meet the people where they are (often times in their comfort zone), without being preachy or overtly didactic. Baraka calls Dahmer's Successor ... Death Jam, Mayor NAZI, Chiller, Insane Killer ... Rudy The Ripper ... Doo Doo Brain, and his message is immediately received. Readers might be inspired to action--maybe to attend a rally, withdraw all support from Giuliani's administration; maybe to write letters to their congressman and hold all such politicians accountable for their deeds for and against the people. …

Suresh Canagarajah, Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. viii+216. Pb. $24.95.

As eighth-grade students of English in a “periphery” community school in India, we were assigned to discuss and to appreciate a piece of prose, from our textbook, called “On not answering the telephone”; it was a satirical piece demonizing telephones because their existence and use flouted all tenets of British English linguistic etiquette. None of us in that class had a phone in our homes, and none of us had any desire to learn the alien etiquette. We were interested only in learning the language to the extent that it could help us realize our immediate and, perhaps, future goals. This was our tacit response, and resistance, to English linguistic imperialism: awareness of the pragmatic rewards of English-language acquisition and use, but negation and denial of the cultural hegemony of English. This dynamic of ideological imposition and resistance (and appropriation) forms the core of Canagarajah's book, Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching.

Distance and Direction (review)

208Fourth Genre and those compassion-fatigued from reading about victims of disasters, disease , and bad parenting. Those who long for a good book about a good life almost have what they want in Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed. However, readers who want a glimpse of the outside world may feel she has puUed the focus in too far, and those who need a quotient of angst to feel engaged with the Ufe on the page wiU have to wait a little longer. Reviewed by Priscilla Hodgkins Distance and Direction by Judith Kitchen Coffee House Press, 2001 236 pages, paper, $14.95 Judith Kitchen is a collector of memories. Not the big bold memories of national dailies and 24-hour news channels. Kitchen's provenance is of the small and ephemeral; she is an accumulator of the delicate receding shadows that fill the normaUy unexamined interstices of experience. In Distance and Direction, Kitchen's new collection of essays, the author uses her memories as self-referential points in time, places from which to examine the process ofremembering. It is an eclectic, wide-ranging coUection : part travel journal, part history, part memoir, part genealogy, and part elegiac paean to the great and lesser losses of an individual life. Kitchen, who is the writer in residence at the State University of New York at Brockport, has written two other essay collections and is the editor of the essay anthology In Brief. Short Takes on the Personal. She is also a poet, and it is this nuanced ability to wrap a memory within the folds ofvivid and detailed language that indelibly marks this fine and evocative collection. A quick look at the table ofcontents reveals that for the most part the collection is comprised by short prose pieces. With titles such as "Red," "Blue," "White," "YeUow," and "Black," it would be easy to presuppose that the collection is but an extended series of impressionistic pieces, a lyrical non-narrative prose poem that values mood and image above story. However, these shorter pieces—more tonal in nature, brief, lucid perambulatory excursions that provide depth and context for the balance of the book—are also the most poetic. "This afternoon Venetian blmds let in their ladders of Ught, blurred at the edges, bleached, like the land itself, covered in snow, the trees blown ragged and restless. Stray branches snap in the wind and scud across the yard. Everything is on hold. Evening comes early, fiUing the window," Book Reviews209 writes Kitchen in her essay "White."A reader (or at least this reader) cannot help but unconsciously supply suggested Une breaks whüe moving through the vivid sentences, as in her essay "Lacrimosa" where Kitchen describes a springtime field from her chüdhood: "In the hedgerows, forsythia. Whole skirts ofyeUow. It takes time to imagine each bush fiUing with leaves that rise and droop into a fountain, defining a space underneath, circle of shade, where a chüd could hide aU morning in a whisper of green." It is in her longer essays that Kitchen shifts from the lyrical to a more narrative voice, and these are the strongest pieces in the coUection. In the tide essay, "Distance and Direction," the author writes about her father's death, not so much about the death itself, but about the process of his dying. "Distance" is the operative word here, the "distance between 1911 in Alma Michigan" (where her father was born) and Baltimore, Maryland (where he died). There is also the distance of his final iUness and death in a Baltimore ICU at the same time that his daughter is busy attending her son's wedding 3,000 miles away. And then there are the more incalculable distances, the silent, emotional distances that separated a father and a daughter over a lifetime . "Here's what I think," Kitchen writes before deftly and unobtrusively shifting into the third person. "If she had stood there in that moment, or the moments after, when he was both there and not there, she would not have moved. She would not have cried or kissed or whispered or touched or entreated. It would have felt familiar, that abandonment." In "Out ofPlace: Reading...