Play Of Voices Research Articles

Vaguening Revenge: Beckett, Marston, and All That Fall

At the beginning of Samuel Beckett’s radio play, All That Fall, Mrs Rooney famously forgets her lines: she cannot quite remember the precise phrase that she strains to recall from John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy. However, what has been overlooked is Beckett’s own forgetfulness as to the origins of this intertextual reference. Repeatedly, he attributes this line (and others from his wider stock of notes) to one of Ford’s close contemporaries: John Marston. This article recovers Beckett’s many mistaken allusions to Marston, and begins to think through the ways in which his curious recurrence in Beckett’s thinking at the time of All That Fall’s composition might betray a particular interest in the revenge genre (in which Marston is so influential). It posits that, in writing All That Fall, Beckett works to ‘vaguen’ many of the formal tropes that recur over the course of revenge drama’s long literary history. It then goes on to explore the possibility that this play for voices might engage specifically with this generic tradition in order to stage a critique of religion.

Hysterical correspondence: A play for voices

Set as a series of psychoanalytic sessions and presented as part case study and part transcript, ‘Hysterical correspondence; A play for voices’ is a fictional correspondence between a hysterical protagonist named Ms B., her analyst S. E. B. and Dr Y., an academic who specializes in fine art critical and contextual studies. The three voices are indicated by three different fonts and colours. By the end of the article, it becomes clear that all three voices belong to the same woman. This article questions whether an art practice that functions as a site of performance of hysterical symptoms can be useful as a form of release in the place of bodily symptoms. Can an art practice exist as a symptom of hysteria, and if so, can this artwork, which is an act of refusal, be put to good use within feminist research to enable greater understanding of hysteria and to reduce dismissive rhetoric around the female experience?

Trifles

Trifles

Feminine personae in the play of voices in Clément Marot’s work

Feminine personae in the play of voices in Clément Marot’s work

Repurposing and the Literary Magazine

MARK PARKER Repurposing and the Literary Magazine W ILLIAM MAGINN, WRITING AS ENSIGN O’DOHERTY IN ONE OF THE FINEST of the Nodes Ambrosianae, offers this assessment of the success of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: People have learnt the great lesson, that Reviews, and indeed all peri­ odicals, merely qua such, are nothing. They take in his book not as a Review, to pick up opinions ofnew books from it, nor as a periodical, to read themselves asleep upon, but as a classical work, which happens to be continued from month to month.1 The implication here—that literary magazines such as Blackwood’s should be objects of study in their own right, and that they constitute something of a genre in themselves—is a suggestive one.2 In this essay I would like to extend this argument by examining the relation between literary magazines and the literary work they consider. More specifically I will take up the question of how such magazines refashion the novel, poetry, drama, and the essay.3 Put another way, I argue that Blackwood’s continual (and admittedly selfserving ) assertions of primacy in the literary world are worth serious con­ sideration, and that more neutral and conventional claims about the rela­ tion of the magazine to literature—such as those articulated (but, as we I. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 12 Quly 1822): 106; hereafter BEM. 2. See my Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) for a discussion of this methodological move. 3. The study of Romantic periodicals has grown rapidly since Jon Klancher published his 1987 study of the reading audiences formed by magazines. His approach—largely classificatory—has been extended by studies that examine the rhetoric ofthe magazine. Mark Schoenfield has asked us to consider the play of voices within magazines; Kim Wheatley taught us to parse the politics ofsuch magazines, whether “paranoid” or gothic, closely; Pe­ ter Murphy urged us to reflect on the intense self-consciousness implied by the proliferation ofmagazine personae. To draw a loose analogy from the sciences, there is a recognizable and sturdy “standard model” for the study of magazines, and more recent books (by David Hig­ gins, Karen Fang, Schoenfield, Simon Hull, Richard Cronin, and David Stewart) have de­ veloped this model in ways both useful and edifying. SiR, 56 (Winter 2017) 479 480 MARK PARKER shall see, not always followed) in the London Magazine by its editor John Scott—are inadequate. Scott’s careful insistence on tracing in his magazine what he calls, quoting Hamlet, the “form and pressure” of the time does not do justice to the force and influence of literary magazines on literary production.4 In fact, the overstatement characteristic of Blackwood’s points to a deeper truth: that the relation between the magazine and other literary forms is dialectical, not simply mimetic. Magazines like Blackwood’s, to bor­ row a phrase from media studies, remediate material from these genres.5 In their cogent account of new media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define remediation as “the representation of one medium in an­ other.”6 Although their focus is on the relation of digital media to earlier forms, they note their debt to the intense interest of literary critics in the refashioning of material within literature—to what we might now term “old-fashioned” studies of influence. In adapting their terminology and analysis to the borderline case of literature and the literary magazine, we can recognize some of our “rejected thoughts” returning to us with the “alienated majesty” that Emerson speaks ofin “Self-Reliance.” For in con­ sidering periodicals as a medium distinct from novels or collections of poems, we need only consider their differing cultural, social, and economic relationships, and especially the relations they cultivate with their audience. As Bolter and Grusin put it: “A medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms and social significance of other media and attempts to rival them or refashion them in the name of the real”—the “real” here being the rapidly growing middle-class reading pub­ lic ofthe first quarter ofthe nineteenth century in Britain and the concom­ itant expansion of the market for books...

Terror and Erebus by Gwendolyn MacEwen: White Technologies and the End of Science

<p align="LEFT"><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">This paper examines Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen’s verse play </span><em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Terror and </span></em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;"><em>Erebus </em></span><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">by considering the play’s representation of technology in light of its own </span><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">poetic technologies. </span><em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Terror and Erebus </span></em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">is a play for voices that features four </span>characters: Franklin, Crozier, Rasmussen, and Qaqortingneq. As the character Rasmussen searches for the traces of the lost expedition, imagining the voices of the explorers in their final hours, his investigation reveals how the “white technologies” used to explore the Arctic succumb to the environment without the indigenous knowledge possessed by the Inuit who inhabit the Arctic. The paper shows how MacEwen’s literary vision contrasts recent coverage of efforts to locate the Franklin ships which have ignored or down-played Inuit testimony. Working from Rasmussen’s transcriptions of Qaqortingneq’s voice, MacEwen represents Inuit knowledge and technology as both an alternative to the model of scientific discovery underwriting the Franklin expedition and as source of the authoritative account of what happened to Franklin and his crew.</p>

Distributed leadership in a Maltese college: the voices of those among whom leadership is ‘distributed’ and who concurrently narrate themselves as leadership ‘distributors’

In the unfolding Maltese education scenario of decentralization and school networking, I explore distributed leadership as it occurs at the college level through the leaders’ narrative and performance in an investigation of the power relations among the different-tiered leaders. This article uses data from the case study of a Maltese college consisting of four primary and three secondary schools. Using these data from an ongoing doctoral study, all subjected to narrative and discourse analysis, I adopt the stance of a ‘story teller’, as I craft a narrative from the data to represent a ‘play of voices’. Foucault’s theories of power, governmentality, discourse and subjectivation are used to explore the unfolding of power relations. Analysis reveals a dichotomy between the leaders’ narrative of distributed leadership and their performance of it. There is the presence of a raging battle among the discourses of collegiality and isolationism, through the discourse of distributed leadership, and within the discourse of educational leadership itself. Distributed leadership is a challenge to perform at the college level; with resistance being demonstrated in overt or more subtle ways along the different hierarchies, although power does circulate. This article contributes to educational leadership literature with regard to the power relations among top educational leaders in a networked school setting.

Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, ‘a Play for Voices’ on Radio, Stage and Television

Dylan Thomas' radio play Under Milk Wood was performed on stage and television soon after its BBC radio premiere won the Prix Italia in 1954. Textual analysis of the 1957 BBC television production demonstrates how it contributed new resonances deriving from the medium's performative conventions and communicative strategies. The nature of the aesthetic values sought by the professional critic and the domestic viewer are evaluated: it is observed that the comparative approach of critics, focusing overwhelmingly on the work's originating form, inhibits full engagement with the innovative creative possibilities of performances of Under Milk Wood in forms of representation with a visual dimension.

‘An Explosive Performing Force’: the Actor in Dylan Thomas

From his childhood in Swansea until his death in New York in 1953, Dylan Thomas was an instinctive actor. During his teenage years he acted in more than twenty-three stage productions, thirteen of them as a member of Swansea's Little Theatre Company. Although his roles were essentially English and his speaking style somewhat mannered, the latter was strongly influenced by the rhythms of the Welsh language spoken by family members and experienced in the chapels of his childhood. Subsequently, radio broadcasts of his poetry and short stories were very much those of an actor, the emphasis on the voice and, in the stories, on the presentation of many varied characters, of which his play for voices, Under Milk Wood, is the supreme example. But Thomas also carried his love of performance into his everyday life, playing the fool and acting outrageously at parties and in pubs. The comment of one of his contemporaries that ‘Dylan was an actor; he acted practically every moment of every day’ could not be nearer the mark. Gwynne Edwards is Emeritus Professor in the Department of European Languages at Aberystwyth University. He is also a playwright, and two of his adaptations of short stories by Dylan Thomas – ‘The Peaches’ and ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’ – have recently been performed by the Swansea Little Theatre Company as part of the Dylan Thomas centenary celebrations.

John Ashbery’s Free Indirect Labor

The early poems of John Ashbery must be read, in part, as a meditation on the plight of labor, particularly white-collar labor, in the postwar United States. Beginning with a very early poem, “The Instruction Manual” (1956), and its exploration of the ambiguous class position of white-collar workers, the essay tracks themes and formalizations of both labor and management as they continue in Ashbery’s highly experimental second book, The Tennis Court Oath (1962). In this book the standpoint of the earlier poem gives way to an explosion of shifting voices as Ashbery’s distinctive use of free indirect discourse and other techniques of point of view registers the contemporary breakdown in labor relations and the crisis for established modes of management. In Ashbery’s mature style of the 1970s, this chaotic play of voices yields to a comparatively measured technology of point of view, which reflects the new modes of management that followed the crises of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Play of Voices in Metaphor Discourse: A Case Study of “NATIONS ARE BROTHERS”

Dialogic patterns around the metaphor “NATIONS ARE BROTHERS” is the object of investigation of this article. The purpose is to demonstrate heteroglossia created by this metaphoric proposition. The article seeks to explore the variation of themes and social implications evoked by the same metaphoric concept. Various social agents adopt and adapt the metaphor to achieve dissimilar communicative and ideological goals. Receivers of the metaphoric message do not react uniformly to the proposition either. Multiple voices are involved in negotiation of values and ideas associated with the metaphor usage. The play of voices around the metaphoric proposition extends, reverses, twists and truncates the mapping of the metaphoric paragon. The article concludes with the discussion of discursive techniques which enable metaphor producer to enlarge or alter the scope of metaphoric inferences. 1Compare Medvedev: my i seychas ispytyvaem bratskie chuvstva po otnosheniyu k gruzinskomu narodu “D. Medvedev: ‘We feel the fraternal feelings towards the Georgian people even now’” (September 7, 2008; retrieved from http://www.newsru.com/arch/russia/07sep2008/grt.html). In this article, Russian politicians maintain that they have only fraternal feelings toward Georgians even after the South Ossetia war which resulted in annexation of South Ossetia from Georgia. Similarly in Putin: Glavnoe v otnosheniyakh s Ukrainoi ne gaz i flot, a chuvstvo loktia “V. Putin: ‘The most important thing in relations with Ukraine is not the gas and the fleet but the feeling of comradeship’” (April 22, 2010; retrieved from http://afn.by/news/i/134633). Putin argues that the feeling of comradeship is more important in relation between Ukraine and Russia than the economic and geopolitical benefits. Ironically, Ukraine had to agree upon a ruinous gas contract with Russia and a Russian military presence in Ukraine.

Le Jeu de la Feuillée et la dissonance du sujet

The Jeu de la Feuillee (Adam de la Halle, 1276) is based upon a dramatic configuration articulated on a plural dissonance, polyphonic and digressive, to a certain extent lacking in cohesion but nevertheless endowed with coherence inasmuch as this articulation becomes a metaphor for the action of the character on the stage. An action which is static: that of a self divided due to the tedium of its daily life, which ends up losing itself in the midst of a contradictory multiplicity. This play of voices is moreover enriched by the presence of a comic quality which, if indeed it attenuates the tragic dimension of the conflict, on the other hand contributes to reducing the absolute nature of the values which configure Adam’s universe and which might thus permit him to resolve his internal tension. The character therefore remains confronted with himself and with his space, in what we might call an interior estrangement, which is manifest in characteristics such as heterotopy, vagrancy, sterility and even untruth fed upon a project which is never realized. All these features converge upon the character, who in some way announces the modern hero and his crisis.

Robert E. Stillman, ed. Spectacle and Public Performance in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006. xxiv + 258 pp. index. illus. tbls. bibl. $120. ISBN: 90-04-14928-7.

Acknowledgments Editor's Foreword List of Contributors List of Illustrations 1. Antichrist on Page and Stage in the Later Middle Ages, Richard K. Emmerson 2. Staging Antichrist and the Performance of Miracles, Peter Cockett 3. "Nothing more nedeful": Politics and the Rhetoric of Accommodation in Elizabeth I's Coronation Procession, Robert E. Stillman 4. Britomart's Backward Glance in Spenser's Faerie Queene: Liminal Triumphs/Dark Erotics in Busirane's Mask of Cupid, Tiffany J. Alkan 5. Spectacle and the Fantasy of Immateriality: Authorship and Magic in John a Kent and John a Cumber, Nora Johnson 6. The Play of Voice: Acknowledgment, Knowledge, and Self-Knowledge in Measure for Measure, Sarah Beckwith 7. Spectacle and Equivocation in Macbeth, Richard C. McCoy 8. Mapping Shakespeare's Britain, Peter Holland 9. The Absent Triumphator in the 1610 Chester's Triumph in Honor of Her Prince, Robert W. Barrett, Jr. 10. Have his "carkasse": The Aftermaths of English Court Masques, Tom Bishop 11. Reading/Genres: On 1630s Masques, Lauren Shohet Index

Utah's UTOPIA: an ethernet-based MPLS/VPLS triple play deployment

Broadband in North America is now at critical mass, passing the inflection point from the early adopter to the early majority. In fact, Strategy Analytics predicts that by 2010, over 78 million U.S. households will have some form of broadband connectivity, much of it capable of delivering the triple play of voice, video, and high-speed Internet access. Their providers will consist of local exchange carriers, multiservice operators, and municipalities that have deployed their own triple play networks. Why the municipalities, and what do they bring to the table? In many instances, smaller cities and towns have been bypassed by the first phases of the incumbent operators' triple play deployments. For reasons of economic development, quality of living, education, and the retention of skilled workforces, the government has stepped in to fill the void. This article looks at the most ambitious municipality-driven triple play deployment in North America, the UTOPIA MetroNet in Utah. The system integrator for UTOPIA is DynamicCity, which early on defined a set of design principles that would make the network successful. These included the requirement that the network be open to multiple service providers, be carrier class, be scalable and based on future-proof technology, and that the architecture be based on open standards while keeping costs to a minimum. The article first reviews some of the considerations behind the choice of the technology and deployment approach based on these guidelines, and then describes in detail the network topology and services architecture, the current status of the deployment, and future plans. Specific topics covered include the use of multiprotocol label switching/virtual private LAN service, IP multicasting, and traffic engineering.

Dylan Thomas: the biography

Mining new material, including personal letters from Thomas himself, Paul Ferris recounts the life of this tragic figure.. Dylan Thomas's life and work have made him a legendary figure in the decades since his death, amidst alcohol and debts, in New York at the age of thirty-nine. At the heart of his achievement are a few dozen poems and stories which, together with his play for voices, Under Milk Wood, haunt the imagination and give his writing a broader appeal than he could have envisioned in his lifetime.Consumed by his vocation as The Poet, ever doubting his own talent, Thomas spent much of life reflecting upon his own worth. But beyond his writing is the checkered figure of the man himself: often comic, at times in despair, always self-obsessed, in the end defeated by his own nature.

Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices by Gladys Swan

Reviews 161 being, a la the Arthurian legends, that the evil has been purged and now God will renew the land. It is little things like this, and the inclusion of a sub-plot involving the travails of a “good” priest, that, in conjunction with the weak dialogue, keeps TheDark Wayfrom being as good as it so easily could have been. GRANT SISK University ofNorth Texas TheHappy Man: A NovelofCaliforniaRanch Life. By Robert O. Easton. Foreword by Gerald Haslam. Introduction byJack Schaefer. (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1993. 222 pages, $12.95.) Since its publication in 1943, the reputation of Robert O. Easton’s The Happy Man: A NovelofCaliforniaRanch Lifehas grown quietly but steadily. Capra Press now marks its 50th anniversary with a third edition. In the 1977 second edition, Jack Schaefer hailed the book as having “a timeless quality.” More recently, it has won high praise from writers as diverse as Ross Macdonald (“An epic work, a masterpiece ofwestern literature”), Ursula Le Guin (“Haunting as the tule-fogs of the Delta”), and Jon Tuska (“One of the best novels of the American West”). Its claim to greatness lies essentially in its down-to-earth characters and artfully crafted tales. TheHappy Man is, asJack Schaefer observed, “a book with subtle overtones emerging out ofthe straightforward simplicity ofnarration,... with never an obtrusive flourish of explanation or sentiment or stylistic trick.” The ranch workers come alive in these pages. And in their follies, dreams, and strengths is found what is timeless and universal in humankind. FR. LEO A. HETZLER St.JohnFisher College Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices. By Gladys Swan. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. 251 pages, $24.95.) Set in the mining town of Chloride, New Mexico, Gladys Swan’s Ghost Dance:A Play ofVoicesexamines communal loss of hope. For western towns such as Chloride, the economic mainstays of cattle, timber, and mining are not what they once were. The cultivation of tourism, it seems, is the current economic corrective to becoming a ghost town. Chloride’s one call-to-beauty is Roselle More, hometown girl and aging movie star, who’s returning now for her first visit in decades to kick-off the town’s rebirth. In the early pages, Roselle walks the town’s nearly deserted streets, and disappears, so one suspects, into the already crowded canvas of “The Ghost Dance,”a legendary oil painting depicting the people and history of 162 WesternAmerican Literature Chloride. She is replaced by a young look-a-like, Joan Gallant. At tale’s end, Joan finds to her confusion that she has become Roselle More for keeps. Another long-ago resident back for a visit is “Bird” Peacock, late middle-aged, the sole surviving offspring of a once-wealthy Chloride pioneer family. Last time “Bird”was home he convinced the local downtown merchants that he had a money machine that converted singles into ten dollar bills. “Bird” is in love with Roselle, or so it seems. Vignettes or snapshots ofminor and supporting characters abound, includ­ ing the merchants of the dying downtown as a Greek chorus, of sorts. Other vividlydepicted characters include Roselle’shigh school drama coach, the town historian with the requisite addled memory, plus an assortment of Hollywood-types drawn to Chloride by Roselle’svisit. Influences of Latin America’s “magic realism” literary movement, Charles G. Finney’s Southwest tale, The Circus ofDr. Lao, and Joan Didion’s Hollywood tale, Play It As It Lays, all seem somehow present in this, Swan’s second novel (her first, the critically well-received Carnivalfor the Gods). Shakespeare’s Puck, Twain’s Tom Sawyer, and Indian America’s trickster-coyote are found in the “Bird”Peacock character. Scenes of the nineteenth century Indian wars, plus a Chloride-inspired playscript help close out the final chapters of this sometimes straightforward, other times complicated tale. An ambitious, off-beat novelwith a strong cerebral bent, Swan’s GhostDance challenges the reader to take a different look at the modern-day West. JAMES B. HEMESATH Adams State College Sign Languages. By James Hannah. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. 168 pages, $19.95.) Sign Languages,James Hannah’s second book, is a collection of nine stories...

The Happy Man: A Novel of California Ranch Life by Robert O. Easton

Reviews 161 being, a la the Arthurian legends, that the evil has been purged and now God will renew the land. It is little things like this, and the inclusion of a sub-plot involving the travails of a “good” priest, that, in conjunction with the weak dialogue, keeps TheDark Wayfrom being as good as it so easily could have been. GRANT SISK University ofNorth Texas TheHappy Man: A NovelofCaliforniaRanch Life. By Robert O. Easton. Foreword by Gerald Haslam. Introduction byJack Schaefer. (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1993. 222 pages, $12.95.) Since its publication in 1943, the reputation of Robert O. Easton’s The Happy Man: A NovelofCaliforniaRanch Lifehas grown quietly but steadily. Capra Press now marks its 50th anniversary with a third edition. In the 1977 second edition, Jack Schaefer hailed the book as having “a timeless quality.” More recently, it has won high praise from writers as diverse as Ross Macdonald (“An epic work, a masterpiece ofwestern literature”), Ursula Le Guin (“Haunting as the tule-fogs of the Delta”), and Jon Tuska (“One of the best novels of the American West”). Its claim to greatness lies essentially in its down-to-earth characters and artfully crafted tales. TheHappy Man is, asJack Schaefer observed, “a book with subtle overtones emerging out ofthe straightforward simplicity ofnarration,... with never an obtrusive flourish of explanation or sentiment or stylistic trick.” The ranch workers come alive in these pages. And in their follies, dreams, and strengths is found what is timeless and universal in humankind. FR. LEO A. HETZLER St.JohnFisher College Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices. By Gladys Swan. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. 251 pages, $24.95.) Set in the mining town of Chloride, New Mexico, Gladys Swan’s Ghost Dance:A Play ofVoicesexamines communal loss of hope. For western towns such as Chloride, the economic mainstays of cattle, timber, and mining are not what they once were. The cultivation of tourism, it seems, is the current economic corrective to becoming a ghost town. Chloride’s one call-to-beauty is Roselle More, hometown girl and aging movie star, who’s returning now for her first visit in decades to kick-off the town’s rebirth. In the early pages, Roselle walks the town’s nearly deserted streets, and disappears, so one suspects, into the already crowded canvas of “The Ghost Dance,”a legendary oil painting depicting the people and history of ...

The Light Possessed by Alan Cheuse

258 WesternAmerican Literature place. He cannot face a future without his beloved wife. Furthermore, to his horror, Mariah and Riley, atfirst at odds in the aftermath of a bitter divorce, re­ discover their passion for each other. Within the frame of this picaresque novel, complicated by forays into history and memory, Doig explores major themes through complex and subtle narratives marked by duality ofvoice: the outwardly superficial and cynical Riley writes sharp, passionate columns, the outwardly laconic Jick is, inwardly, poet and philosopher. Through the play ofvoices, Doig explores issues of epistemology , tensions between past and present, conflicts between formal history and personal narrative, intricacies of memory, questions of responsibility. Finally Jick’s inner and outer voices merge, and he is able to make unconventional decisions about his daughter, his future, his land. In his 1964 essay, “History, Myth and the Western Writer,”Wallace Stegner lamented that no one had yet created a western Yoknapawpha county, traced historical continuities of the region. With This House of Sky and the Montana trilogy, Doig has done just that. But comparisons with Faulkner, or anybody else, must be made reservedly—Doig’s work is unique, and his voice ultimately realistic,joyous, life-affirming. ELIZABETH SIMPSON Gottingen, Germany The Light Possessed. By Alan Cheuse. (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, Peregrine Smith Books, 1990. 325 pages, $19.95.) The Light Possessed is a novel based on episodes from the life of Georgia O’Keeffe. Although the protagonist is called Ava Boldin, the events of her life and the names of some of the other characters (especially her husband, a professional photographer and gallery owner called Albert Stigmar, a character obviously modeled on Alfred Stieglitz) make absolutely clear that the book is largely about O’Keeffe. Running through the novel is a second narrative about Michael, a sculptor and Stigmar’s illegitimate son, and Michael’s girlfriend Amy, a would-be writer from Bennington College. The narratives come to­ gether when Michael and Amy travel to New Mexico to live and work with the aging Ava. This is a strange book. Some of the names of people and places involved in O’Keeffe’s life are changed, but others are not. Some of the changes are obvious, such as that of Stigmar. West Texas State Teacher’s College becomes Canyon State College, yet the town it is in remains Canyon. Stanley Edgar Hymen’s name is not changed, yet the narrative concerning Michael and Amy says some terrible things about Hymen and his wife. Bernard Malamud, Sherwood Anderson, and Mabel Dodge also appear under their own names. The book is disappointing in several ways. Too much of it is simple narra­ Reviews 259 tive of what happened where, perhaps because Cheuse tries to cover too many episodes from O’Keeffe’s life. Also, the pose in the framing device that some of the material is supposedly from Amy’s research into Ava’s life at times does not work, especially in the section entitled “Vermont”in which Michael recounts for Amy many things she knows from having been involved in them Still, the novel reads quickly. Some of its characters, such as Ava, her brother Robert, and her friend and his lover, Harriet Cardoza, come to life. It gives good descriptions of many places important to O’Keeffe’s life and works, especially places in Chicago; Canyon, Texas; New York City; and New Mexico. And it echoes some of O’Keeffe’s more interesting and lyrical statements about the light found in all of these places. RICHARD TUERK East Texas State University HeartMountain. By Gretel Ehrlich. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989. 412 pages, $8.95.) Heart Mountain tells at least two stories about the internment ofJapaneseAmerican citizens during the Second World War, one from the Anglo-American perspective and one from that of a group of Japanese-Americans relocated there. Gretel Ehrlich attempts to probe the barriers between the two cultures, forced together in the unnatural relationship of captor and captives. Although her promise of insight into Japanese culture is not fulfilled, the stories arising out of the people residing near Heart Mountain are deftly told with compelling detail. One plot line follows McKay, a rancher...

A Play of Voices: The Theater of Osman Lins

A Play of Voices: The Theater of Osman Lins

Darkroom: A Play for Voices

Darkroom: A Play for Voices