Reader's Imagination Research Articles

Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language (review)

Reviewed by: Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language Jared Lobdell Croft, Janet Brennan , ed. Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, 2007. viii, 327 pp. $35.00 (trade paperback) ISBN 9780786428274. Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2. Tolkien's rather mixed views on Shakespeare's plays are well-known, at least among Tolkien scholars, and Janet Brennan Croft conveniently summarizes them in her introduction: on the one hand, his youthful dislike of the remnants of Shakespeare's Warwickshire life, his contempt for Shakespeare's "Pigwiggenry" and Macbeth's Weird Sisters, his curriculum reforms that reduced emphasis on such "Moderns" as Shakespeare and Milton; on the other, perhaps, his lecturing on Shakespeare along with other younger members of the English Faculty at Oxford (he lectured on Hamlet), his enjoyment of a performance of Hamlet (in 1944), his references to Lear in his Beowulf lecture, his thoughtful claim in "On Fairy-stories" that Shakespeare would have been better off if he could have written Macbeth as a story rather than a play. Even if Tolkien made rather a point of not caring for Shakespeare, as the editor points out, he knew Shakepseare's works well—and as the editor also points out, he was fully cognizant of the problems of writing fantastic or Faërie drama: "In this essay Tolkien illustrates his point about the inability of Drama to represent Faërie by describing how depicting the witches through stage trickery detracts from the power of their portrayal in the reader's imagination" (2-3). [End Page 257] The essays following the Introduction are arranged thematically "according to the broad themes and motifs which concerned both authors: Faërie, Power, Magic, and The Other (there is of course a great deal of overlap between these categories; they are all interrelated)" (3). The ideas implicit in this would seem to be that in some way Shakespeare influenced Tolkien (which is an explicit claim in a couple of the essays) and, more often, that seeing how these two authors addressed these themes will help us understand both of them—or at least Tolkien—better. I am not entirely convinced, but let us see. In fact, the essays pretty much resolve themselves into those looking at A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, Henry V, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear (not much on Hamlet). From the fact that I made the comparison with Henry V myself several years ago (though much more allusively and in less detail), it may correctly be inferred that this is the place where I am most sympathetic to looking at Shakespeare to understand Tolkien, but I hope I am fair-minded about the others. There are, however, two caveats to be entered here. First, when the distinguished Shakespearean Nevill Coghill contributed to the festschrift English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (1962), his contribution was the brilliantly à propos "God's Wenches and the Light That Spoke (Some Notes on Langland's Kind of Poetry)"—with its implicit personification of Tolkien as Langland. We need to keep this in mind when we look at Tolkien's appreciation of the common man (and we might remember the figure of John Bunyan as well). Second, though we can (and I have) traced a literary connection between Shakespeare and Tolkien, it runs not from Shakespeare as we know him now (or even Shakespeare as Tolkien knew him "then"—whenever "then" was), but from Shakespeare through the Eighteenth Century, into Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, thence to Tolkien—very much not the Shakespeare we know now. Just as we must keep in mind what Anne Hathaway's Cottage looked like in 1908 when viewing Tolkien's remarks on Shakespeare in 1908, so we must remember, when searching for Shakespeare's influence on Tolkien, that, if it does exist, it isn't the influence of Shakespeare as we know him now. But that of course does not preclude our looking at the way Shakespeare treats a theme to illuminate the way Tolkien treats that theme—quite another thing from looking at Shakespeare...

Nouvelles Françaises Du Dix-Neuvième Siècle: Anthologie by Allan H. Pasco

MLR, I03.2, 2008 543 Chapter i draws on Reik and Deleuze to argue that the (virtual) spectator's position in relation toSade's plays involves a kind ofmasochism avant la lettre,as the spectator is rendered 'impotent yet attentivewithin the safe illusion' (p. 3 I). This claim, along with the idea thatSade's theatre isproperly viewed in themind's eye rather than on stage, provides a connecting thread for thework as awhole. Chapter 2 examines what theSadean aesthetic of tout montrer, normally associated with thenovels,might mean in relation to theplays. Chapter 3 suggests that inhis emphasis on spectacle Sade tends to subvert traditional generic distinctions 'so as toassert the independent artistover a figureof authority' (p. 82), but once again from amasochistic position. In Chapter 4 the essential point is that 'the [Sadean] tableau thathalts action to suspend carnage isalien to sadism, whereas it is an essential aspect ofmasochism' (p. I03). Chapters 5 and 6 offer innovative analyses ofLes Yumelles, Le Boudoir, and Les Antiquaires. The first two are presented as explorations of the gaze, which is revealed to be 'partial, compromised and redundant as a means of accessing truth' (p. I44). As for Les Antiquaires, in that play 'the pleasures of dramatic performance are lost to literary playfulness' as the reader is drawn into an intertextual 'network of exchange and comparison' (p. I58). The seventh and final chapter considers the relation of Sade's theatre to the post-classical or (pre-)Romantic sublime. This involves the following claim: 'Immaterial yet spectacular, Sadean drama uses thedispositif thMtral toplot a stage-like space of fantasy in the reader's imagination' (p. I73). We are thus invited to appreciate Sade's plays as theymight be seen by our mind's eye, rather than wondering if they can actually be produced. Overall this is an engaging analysis, fullof interestingand thought-provoking insights.The author's grasp of the literary and aesthetic debates of Sade's time is impressive. Although not every reader will be convinced of the value thatWynn claims for Sade's plays, his study effectively challenges us to re-examine themboth in themselves and in their relation to thenovels. UNIVERSITY OF KENT JAMES FOWLER Nouvellesfranpaises du dix-neuviemesiecle: anthologie. Ed. by ALLANH. PASCO. Char lottesville: Rookwood. 2oo6. 487 pp. $59.95. ISBN 978-I-886365-59-9. This substantial anthology comprises an introduction entitled 'Qu-est-ce que lanou velle?', followed by twenty-six texts from seventeen authors. Many of the stories chosen are acknowledged classics, and most of thewriters major figures.They in clude fourwomen: Mme de Stael, George Sand, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, and Rachilde. Chateaubriand is represented by 'Rene, Balzac by 'Le Colonel Chabert' and two other texts, Stendhal by 'Vanina Vanini', Merimee by 'Carmen', 'Mateo Falcone', and 'La Venus d'Ille', Flaubert by 'Un cceur simple', Maupassant by 'Le Horla' and three shorter tales,Huysmans by 'Avau-l'eau'. Hugo and Zola make the selection, as do Vivant Denon, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam, andMar cel Schwob, whereas Gautier is surprisingly omitted. Pasco's introductory essay was originally published inNew Literary History in i99 i, and is effectivelya study of the poetics and problematics of the genre. He arrives at theunremarkable definition that 'une nouvelle est une courte fiction litteraireecrite en prose' (p. 6) (except when it is in verse), but then concedes that 'de telles discussions sont steriles et ne ciblent pas les enjeux reels' (p. 9). Yet although the anthology is aimed primarily at students, he makes no real attempt to introduce either the literaryhistory of short fictionor the social history of nineteenth-century France, still less to explore the cultural and lin guistic barrierswhich confront the twenty-first-centuryreader ofmany of these texts. No rationale isoffered forthechoice of texts,and while theyappear largely inchrono logical order of authors, this isnot always the case: thusHugo appears afterFlaubert, 544 Reviews Maupassant before Zola, Huysmans before Barbey. Each author's career ispresented in a couple of pages and followed by a brief bibliography. These sketches provide fac tual information, but few clues as tohow to interpret the texts.They are sometimes oddly redundant ormisleading: thuswe are told thatBalzac was 'unpetit homme trop rond, aux...

Korean Literature and Performance?: Sijo!

Korean Literature and Performance?Sijo! David R. McCann (bio) The Korea Wave has brought sustained attention to Korean cultural productions of various kinds, ranging from the television drama series Winter Sonata and its descendents, through Korean musical and music groups starting with the 1990s hip-hop group Seo Tae Ji and Boys to the widely reported 2006 Madison Square Garden concert by the singer Rain. Among many features of the Wave, one less visible aspect has been its cultural transparency: in China and Japan, Korean cultural creations are perceptibly Korean, but in a somewhat abstract way. For Korean songs, Japanese- or Chinese-language lyrics may be substituted. For Korean television productions, the plots turn on what are viewed as traditional Confucian values, part of a shared Asian cultural heritage it seems, according to the audiences that have been studied. A slightly different way to put this point is that the performance, as much as the given particulars of its contents, seems to attract an international audience. If a performance dimension seems a relevant criterion by which to assess the globalizational adaptivity of Korean cultural productions, is there any comparable performance dimension to literature, and to poetry in particular? The question is not simply an academic one. Many Korean literary critics, as well as readers and authors, wonder why Korean literature has not found the same [End Page 359] broad and deep international acceptance as have the pop culture constituents of the Korea Wave. The literary reading tour provides one form of literary performance. Bruce Fulton, at the University of British Columbia, has for many years traveled every fall with Korean writers for a week or more, presenting readings in North American venues of contemporary literary works with English-language accompaniment. The poet Ko Un has traveled all over the world to read his work, and has built a strong and enthusiastic international following among readers and writers including Robert Hass, Gary Snyder, and other renowned poets. Ko Un is a remarkably charismatic artist; his reading of the poem "Arirang" elicited a powerful response from an audience at the Folger Shakespeare Library a few years ago. There are at least two other performance dimensions to Korean poetry that seem worthy of notice. The pop singer Maya's version of Kim Sowŏl's iconic "Azaleas," on her CD "Born to Do It," completely transfigures the poem, known since its publication in 1925 as a "folksong poem," or Minyoshi.1 One could imagine a concert in which Maya performed her version of the Sowŏl poem along with, perhaps, Yi Sang's famously Modernist poem "Crow's Eye Map," Ogamdo, or Manhae's "Ferry Boat and [End Page 360] Passenger," Narut'pae wa haeng'in, to list just two poems that, in a performance style such as hers, might seem quite different from their usual literary construals. There are, however, other performance dimensions to Korean poetry. "Azaleas" gives a series of directional instructions: "I" and "look at," in the Na pogiga that begins the poem, indicate a single point, the "I," and a straight line, "look at." The poem then bends the line away into a curve, with the word yŏkkyŏwŏ, a term that reverses the semantic field of what has preceded it, deflecting the happy anticipation of the opening phrase of the poem, "To look at me," into a diametrically contrary reaction: When, sick of looking at me, you. . . . That curved line then straightens into the going away, kasil ttae enŭn, and a sort of mental dance performance, from point to straight line, through the curve of "sick of" and into the straight line of movement away, has begun. The second stanza extends the movements and gestures into the grand invocation of the landscape and the flowers of Mount Yak, while the third brings the dance steps down to the feet, in the intimate treading gestures of the stanza. The final stanza, repeating the first two lines of the opening stanza, ends the poem with an ambiguous rhetorical gesture, perhaps accompanied in the reader's imagination by some hand gesture indicating closure, not weeping. There are a number of other poems which might suggest a performance-oriented, choreographic...

Form(ul)ation of a novel narrative form: Nineteenth-century pedagogues and the comics

‘[Our goal is to] carry through a difficult struggle against a type of literature that is loathsome by any measure.’2 This manifesto prefaced a 1964 academic study entitled La Presse enfontine française (The French Youth Press), one of the final salvos fired in a campaign of censorship that held the French comic-book industry in a vise for nearly 20 years following the Second World War. Reflecting widely held views among francophone educators of the time, the periodical study drafted by members of the Commission de surveillance et de contrôle des publications destinees il l'enfonce et à l'adolescence [Children and teenager publications monitoring committee] indiscriminately denounced comic books not only as the scourge of moral corruption that threatened the young readers of Astérix, Spirou or Tintin, but also as a force that caused them no less than to unlearn the teaching provided at school. The authors believed that two forces lay at work behind such an enervating influence. One was the potential immorality of themes contained in the so-called bande dessinée, or BD, though that liability, inherent in any narrative medium whatever, was already kept in check through legislation. The second factor, however, was more problematic, as no edifYing endeavor could ever redeem it: it was the very nature of the bande dessinée as a narrative medium based on a largely pictorial delivery of information. Indeed, the report attributed to such a narrative form an inherent degenerative teleology, lamenting a perceived tendency: ... to eliminate the text gradually in favor of the image. The pictures constitute a sequence within which the action unfolds exclusively, while the text remains limited to the narrow confmes of a caption or to brief direct speech appearing in the mouth [sic] of a character .... Reading a modern youth magazine no longer involves any intellectual activity; the image takes over, and this type of ‘reading’ consists in a passive abandon to sensory stimuli that exert violent impressions on the child's mind and bypass any critical process. Moreover, the concrete representation of the scenes depicted rules out the use of the reader's imagination.2

Gênero e super-heróis: o traçado do corpo masculino pela norma

As Histórias em Quadrinhos de super-heróis ganham vida na imaginação dos leitores, estabelecendo fortes ligações com seu cotidiano. Um corpo musculoso e viril vem historicamente se tornando o referencial de corporeidade masculina, enquanto corpos que desviam desse modelo são comumente satirizados ou excluídos da mídia. Este ensaio objetiva discutir as formas de representação do corpo masculino nas HQs da DC Comics, especificamente nas histórias de Superman e de Batman, conforme a caracterização de personagens como "heróis", "vilões" ou "coadjuvantes". Nossa premissa é a de que estas caracterizações remetem a tendências distintas de representação dos corpos, (re)produzindo normas sociais e valores de estética sobre as corporeidades.

Essentialism, Consistency and Islam: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism

Since 9/11, and obviously for some considerable time before it, a question has arisen about the relationship between Islam and terrorism. Is it legitimate to prefix the term ‘terrorism’ with the ad...

From the Mountain to the Monsters

From the Mountain to the Monsters Christopher Clausen (bio) Take nature as your moral guide, and before long you find yourself haunted by nightmares of monsters. The relation between cosmic nature and human ethical conduct was the most important intellectual problem of the nineteenth century. Not coincidentally the invention of monsters on the grand scale was among the most lasting nineteenth-century literary achievements. One of the little noticed genealogies of literary history is the direct line that runs from William Wordsworth at the beginning of the century to such vivid offspring as Mr. Hyde (1886), Dracula (1897), and the Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) at its end. Monsters loomed large in the romantic imagination from the start. What Wordsworth refers to in his autobiographical poem The Prelude (1805 version) as "the impressive discipline of fear" is the preeminent means by which the natural world impresses itself on the developing mind. In one of that poem's most famous passages he describes a minor childhood transgression and the haunting that followed it: One summer evening (led by her [Nature]), I found A little boat tied to a willow tree Within a rocky cove, its usual home. Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice Of mountain echoes did my boat move on Soon the grim shape of retribution appeared as the mountain itself seemed to follow the child: a huge peak, black and huge As if with voluntary power instinct, Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape [End Page 239] Towered up between me and the stars, and still For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me. The neurotically imaginative boy quickly returned the boat; but for days afterward he remained fearful and depressed at the sight: No familiar shapes Remained, no pleasant images of trees, Of sea or sky, no colors of green fields; But huge and mighty forms, that do not live Like living men, moved slowly through the mind By day, and were a trouble to my dreams. Every era in criticism interprets the literary symbols of the past according to its own tastes and fancies. A look at contemporary writing about Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and especially about Bram Stoker's Dracula, demonstrates, not surprisingly, that psychoanalytic and feminist critics have recently had the monsters almost to themselves. After all Sigmund Freud was a pioneer in the interpretation of dreams, and while the cast of Dr. Jekyll has no significant female characters, an ability to unleash women's sexuality is one of Count Dracula's conspicuous charms. Postcolonial criticism, another school of the past twenty years, has also taken a crack at the monsters, seeing them sometimes, in the jargon of multiculturalism, as misunderstood "others" and perceiving them alternatively as manifestations in the ruling-class mind of fears inspired by the Irish, the proletariat, or other downtrodden and potentially rebellious groups. As do Freudians, though in more explicitly political terms, postcolonial critics find in any monster worth its salt the rising up of the repressed—in this case, repressed guilt and terror dole out justified retribution. Perhaps, because the contemporary critical emphasis on repression, both psychological and political, is so strong, few critics emphasize the continuities between late nineteenth-century monsters and early nineteenth-century romanticism. Yet a perfectly [End Page 240] plausible account that puts the monsters in their historical place can be devised in terms of moral and intellectual categories the nineteenth century would have easily recognized, without denying that repression of several kinds plays a part in the monster's power over the twenty-first-century reader's imagination. The question is not so much one of direct influence—though Wordsworth's impact on the later nineteenth century was enormous—as it is a set of attitudes that was common currency among Victorian writers. Remember that Freud himself was a Victorian doctor who developed his theory of repression at around the same time when most of these...

SELECTIVE OUTLOOKS ON THE WORLD

The definition of exoticism seems to have emerged out of a very European perspective. The setting of literature is provided by distant countries, far away from Europe. The European reader's imagination is supposed to be caught by the attractions of these countries, their mysterious conditions and the peculiar habits of their inhabitants. The less he knows about the foreign countries, the more attractive these countries become for the author of literature.1 Exoticism as understood by Segalen, is mostly tropical, it requires palms and blue skies.2 But let us keep in mind that there is more to exoticism than just an exotic setting. It implies the atmosphere of the foreign, i.e., the creation of an ambience in art and literature.3 This atmosphere is a strong sensuous phenomenon, something that can almost be seen or touched. In early European examples of literary exoticism like Baudelaire's Parfum exotique the fragrant smell of the body gives rise to illusions about the ocean, the sun, ships, and foreign countries.4 The artist of exoticism is looking for sensual impressions, he is craving for foreign and cultures and masters them in his piece of art.5 Last not least, exoticism is a kind of feeling that comes up while one is still at home, to cite Joseph Roth (1894-1939): Thus the foreign became familiar, without loosing its colour, and his home gained the eternal magic of the foreign.6 Even if European authors are not explicitly mentioned, exoticism is understood as a historical European phenomenon associated with a specific mood and a certain intellectual

Wolfgang Iser's Eighteenth Century

A stage in the history of reading underlies the origins of Wolfgang Iser's method. His distinctive theory of reading is adumbrated in the writings of the period of his original specialty, the eighteenth century. In The Implied Reader Iser takes his theoretical hints and directions from the narrators of Fielding and Sterne. Through an examination of the chapters on eighteenth-century novels in The Implied Reader (and of Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy) as well as the theoretical position of The Act of Reading, this essay argues that by utilizing a range of eighteenth-century writers who insist upon the role of the reader's imagination in a process that leads to different meanings for each, Iser proposes that readers should read as they demonstrably did read during the eighteenth century rather than as they read in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The importance of Wolfgang Iser's early work in the history of Anglo-German aesthetics is that he recovered, brought to consciousness, theorized, and extended the implications of a mode of reading largely bypassed during the last several centuries.

Circles and the In-Between: Shaping Time, Space, and Paradox in Swinburnian Verse

One of the first trends that we note upon looking at Swinburne's landscape and erotic poetry is his tendency toward the use of paradox. Taking this technique as lens through which to observe Swinburnian verse, we find ourselves caught in kaleidoscopic world of abstractions. In most of Swinburne's landscape poetry, images are at once drawn and thereupon erased, observations asserted and thereupon rejected. Essentially, we find ourselves groping blindly through dark scenes ensconced in contradiction. However, once we understand the many reasons for Swinburne's attraction to this particular poetic device, we may comprehend the Swinburnian vision as one which always and necessarily depends upon the phenomenology of contradiction and ambiguity. When defining and then redefining an image or scene, Swinburne is, first and foremost, illustrating the transient nature of time. In poems such as Evening on the Broads and On the Cliffs, as descriptions are stated and then retracted, the reader slowly feels his way toward physical picture of the landscape while the natural forms themselves change shape; they emerge and reemerge, are sculpted, remolded, and reborn. This process of metamorphosis becomes for Swinburne the quintessential representation of time, and yet, despite this logical and constant state of physical transformation, the reader more often than not finds himself always in between two worlds. The sense of being caught in physical and temporal state of in-between once again points to Swinburne's forever-warring paradoxes. Once we realize another manner in which Swinburne uses paradox, however, this constant state of in-between begins to resolve itself. When Swinburne aligns two binaries, he does not necessarily relate them to one another through distancing technique, but rather he conjoins these opposites. Swinburne is thus attracted to the moment of unity in which two opposing forms become one. Like the slow evolution that takes place in Swinburnian metamorphosis, this fusion of forms too is process. It becomes for Swinburne the state toward which all elements are destined. Paradox, for Swinburne, demands this process of unfolding, and as binary opposites struggle with one another throughout his poems, they ultimately come together in an almost erotic moment of union. This pointed interest in the moment of unity likewise accounts for Swinburne's structural and metaphorical dependence on circularity. Thus we come to see the paradoxical landscape as circular one, and all of the contradictions of Swinburnian verse finally resolve themselves temporally and spatially into the single form, or shape, of circle. This circular aspect to Swinburne's poetry is essential to understanding his uniqueness among his contemporaries, an issue which Swinburne critics have long struggled to resolve. When John D. Rosenberg attempts to describe the slippage of form and space in Swinburne's verse, he states that Swinburne is a poet not of natural objects but of natural energies. (1) Although it is true that kind of natural energy is the only thing which survives in Swinburne's unusual landscapes, it is not merely this energy which lies at the focal point of Swinburne's poems, but it is the ever-morphing form, the ever shifting manifestation of time, which Swinburne forces upon his reader's imagination. Therefore, we must suspend our chronological, differentiating eye in order to accommodate Swinburne's poetic vision of paradox and circularity. In natural world in which everything, time and space included, is forever shifting and overlapping upon itself, the only constant is the circle. This peculiar perspective, which resolves all things into an harmonic or at times even disharmonic union, places Swinburne's visuals on an entirely different plane from those of his contemporaries. poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Elizabeth Barrett Browning illustrate in their respective poems As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame and Aurora Leigh, the ideal poetic vision in Victorian terms is one of minutiae. …

Erasing Narration: Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies and Texts for Nothing

Erasing Narration:Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies and Texts for Nothing Wolfgang Iser I A poem by John Hollander begins with the line "nothing makes something happen." Any negating gesture must nullify something, and will be governed by an intention, motive, or impulse, all of which remain virtual and can only be inferred from what is negated or from the way in which negation operates. Thus negation makes virtual realities emerge, but these are usually hard to grasp. One of the most telling examples of the interrelationship between negation and emergence is provided by Beckett. Approaching his work from this angle entails breaking away from the main categories that guide most of the prevailing Beckett criticism. On the one hand, the multifarious negations of Beckettian texts are taken for an all-encompassing demolition of what has come down from the past. On the other hand, they figure as a stimulus to the reader's imagination. In other words, the two categories have either representation or reception as their framework. If reception allows us at least to say something about what the text makes the reader do, representation makes these texts verge on senselessness. Consequently, what we have to focus on is the performative character of the Beckettian text, which tends to be ignored when viewed in terms of both representation and reception, since the latter only gives the reader something to "perform." It may well be the hallmark of literature that it is performative by nature, as it brings hitherto non-existent phenomena into being. In Beckett's case it is all the more essential to spotlight the emergent character of literature in contradistinction to representation and reception. This gives a different slant to the negations in his texts. Negation becomes an agent that makes things happen in the sense that [End Page 1] John Hollander was alluding to. The more intensely this agent operates, the more nuanced the emergent becomes. But owing to the incessant cancellation of what has come into being, none of these phenomena can congeal into a product. This turns cancellation itself into an emergent phenomenon, because by discrediting what has emerged, it makes virtual realities happen. Beckettian negation turns emergence into a "thought-provoking reality," which, of course, is differently processed by individual readers. However, it is the performative nature of the text and not the reader that makes such phenomena happen. In order to delineate these phenomena and to trace the strategies that make negations productive, we shall have a look at Malone Dies and Texts for Nothing. II In praising James Joyce, Beckett once remarked, "His writing is not about something; it is that something itself' (1984: 27). This is equally true of Malone Dies, which is not about Malone's longing for his awaited end but constitutes the wait itself. How is this achieved in a narrative whose subject matter is the impossibility of presenting its subject matter? There is a hint in a letter which Beckett wrote as early as 1937 to Axel Kaun, in which he says: "Let us hope the time will come, thank God in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today."1 In Malone Dies Beckett has succeeded insofar as narration itself is "misused." This implies no less than narration narrating its own invalidation. Hegel once stated: "Thinking is always the negation of what we have immediately before us" (1927, I: 57; my translation), and what is immediately given in a narrative is narration, which now has to be nullified. What is to be erased is the mimetic nature of narration, and this invalidation is effected by the many "holes" that Beckett "bores" into [End Page 2] the first-person deliberations of Malone, and into the string of stories that Malone tells himself – a procedure that we shall inspect in due...

The fabric of the cosmos: space, time, and the texture of reality

From the bestselling author of The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos takes us on an irresistible and revelatory journey through the biggest of the big questions. What is reality? Could we exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? What are the limits of the universe? Brian has made the mysteries of space and time accessible to millions with his acclaimed writings and award-winning TV series. Now he reveals a world more beautiful and bizarre than we could have imagined, where 'dark matter' reigns, space warps and wiggles through eleven dimensions, minute particles dance, fizz and teleport across vast distances, everything is made of vibrating strings and, like an ant on a lily-pad, we may be floating on a sliver of spacetime. Revealing new layers of reality that lie just beneath the surface of our everyday lives, this grand tour of the universe will make you look at the world in a completely new way. A must-read. (Sunday Times). Greene takes us to the limits of space and time. (Guardian). Sends the reader's imagination hurtling through the universe on an astonishing ride. (The New York Times). Brian is well known to many fans as a populariser of theoretical physics. He is the author of the bestselling books about string theory, The Elegant Universe, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and The Hidden Reality. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, he has taught at both Harvard and Cornell and has been Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia University since 1996.

Resurrection, ascension and the developing portrait of the God of Israel in Acts

This article exemplifies a theological hermeneutic where the concerns of systematic theology shape the way a NT text is read. It intends to show that the unfolding testimony of Acts 1–2 (1) continues the process begun in Luke 24 of moving its audience towardan incipiently triune portrait of Yahweh; (2) provides public testimony to the truth of God's lordship by narrating its embodiment in a restored Israel; (3) enlarges a trinitarian reader's imagination with regard to the nature of the triune life of God when that imagination is stimulated by Luke's portrait of the embodied risen and ascended Son.

Crackpots

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessCrackpotsKathleen Biebel, Ph.D.Kathleen BiebelSearch for more papers by this author, Ph.D.Published Online:1 Dec 2003https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.54.12.1663AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Sara Pritchard won the Breadloaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize for fiction with Crackpots, her first novel. The novel's protagonist, Ruby Reese, leads the reader through 18 stories linked by characters, events, and place. The "crackpots" of the title are members of the Reese family, which include Ruby's eccentric, superstitious, and "half-crazy" mother, Eva; her demolition expert father, Albert; her talented yet self-destructive brother, Mason; and her escapist bookworm sister, Albertine. The characters are rounded out by a series of aging aunts, neighbors, and Ruby's three ex-husbands: the violent and abusive Boo; Oskar, the mumbling Swedish efficiency expert; and Miles, the hard-drinking poetry professor.The reader follows Ruby from birth to age 52 through a series of stories and narratives written in the first, second, and third person. This style is at times confusing—the stories move backward and forward in time and are often woven together with the thinnest of threads. However, Pritchard's use of language is beautiful, and she paints wondrously vivid descriptions of even the most mundane subjects. In one scene, Ruby is described sunbathing with the beautiful Sigourney Weaver-look-a-like twins Vivian and Maureen Muldar: "Ruby lies down between them, pale and slathered with zinc oxide, in her faded green Jantzen one-piece, looking from a small airplane like a turkey breast with iceberg lettuce between two slices of rye."The first line of Crackpots is "Memory is an odd fellow." This introduction shapes the reading of the book and the interpretation of the narrative. The reader is never quite sure what is real and what is imagined and is left with the sense that perhaps even the author isn't sure and has left a lot of Ruby's life up to the reader's imagination. This blur between memory and imagination continues through the use of multiple narrators, including the voices of family members, Ruby as a child, and Ruby as an adult.The fine detail of the writing may lead the reader to wonder whether Crackpots is not as much a memoir as it is a piece of fiction. Especially as Ruby's character ages, Pritchard does a nice job illustrating Ruby as an assemblage of her untraditional upbringing. Events that might ordinarily be seen only as tragic—for example, 13-year-old Ruby's acting as caregiver for her dying mother—are also viewed with humor and eloquence. This book will be of interest to those who are looking for a skillful and poetic description of the complex circumstances that make up a person's life.Dr. Biebel is a research instructor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School Center for Mental Health Services Research in Worcester.by Sara Pritchard; Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003, 194 pages, $12 FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 54Issue 12 December 2003Pages 1663-1663 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 December 2003 Published in print 1 December 2003

Rhetoric and Epistemology in Early Printed Recipe Collections

The classic cookbook borrows features from the otherwise radical ly opposed genres of encyclopedia and confession. On the one hand, the world categorized, diagnosed, defined, explained, alpha beticized; on the other, the self laid bare, all quirks and anecdotes and personal history. All contributions to the form belong on a continuum with Larousse Gatronomique at one end and at the other . . . well, perhaps can leave that to the reader's imagina tion. One could name here any of the works of which my Proven?al (English) neighbor (now dead) used to say: I love cookbooks?d'you know, read them like novels? ?John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

What are the chances?: voodoo deaths, office gossip, and other adventures in probability

Our lives are governed by chance. But what, exactly, is chance? In this book, accomplished statistician and storyteller Bart K. Holland takes us on a tour of the world of probability. Weaving together tales from real life-from the spread of the bubonic plague in medieval Europe or the number of Prussian cavalrymen kicked to death by their horses, through IQ test results and deaths by voodoo curse, to why you have to wait in line for rides at Disneyworld-Holland captures the reader's imagination with surprising examples of probability in action, everyday events that can profoundly affect our lives but are controlled by just one number. As Holland explains, even chance events are governed by the laws of probability and follow regular patterns called statistical laws. He shows how such laws are successfully applied, with great benefit, in fields as diverse as the insurance industry, the legal system, medical research, aerospace engineering, and climatology. Whether you have only a distant recollection of high school algebra or use differential equations every day, this book offers examples of the impact of chance that will amuse and astonish.

A Road Through Mali-Kuli: A Novel

Review: A Road Through Mali-Kuli: A Novel By Agi Kiss Reviewed by Tracy Dobson Michigan State University, USA Agi Kiss. A Road Through Mali-Kuli: A Novel. Washington, DC: 1stBooks Library, 2001. 411 pp. ISBN 0-7596-4992-8 (paper). US$14.00. Acid-free paper. A well-written and highly engaging mystery, A Road Through Mali-Kuli stimulates thought about deeper questions of international development and environmental conservation. Along with her strong grasp of the international development arena, Kiss knows sub-Saharan Africa well. Her rich descriptions of the local scene give the reader a strong sense its sights, sounds, and smells. From the Delamere Terrace in a Nairobi hotel (a real place) to the raunchy Cock and Bull bar in Mwatumi, Rumura (a fictional African country), scenes will be familiar to those who frequent such places, and they will engage the imagination of readers who haven't. Including characters like the grubby and clueless Australian tourists and the old British couple sitting in a faded hotel lounge, sipping gin and muttering about the good old days gives the story a greater sense of authenticity. Kiss entertains the reader with a fast-paced mystery containing numerous unexpected twists and turns. She also foregrounds important questions about validity, efficacy, and morality of externally directed attempts to bring about sustainable development in developing nations. Speaking metaphorically of the difficulties involved, she describes the Mali Kuli forest: if you look at the forest from far away, it looks like a blanket of solid green. When you get a little closer, you see there are actually lots of different shades of green. And if you get right inside it ... you see it's also black, white and brown and yellow and red ... you can see every color in the world in the forest ... and so, the closer you look at something, the more complicated it becomes (p. 246). Who is Mr. Singh? Traveling back and forth between Nairobi and the Rumura, everyone seeks to meet this elusive man. The plot revolves around various expatriate efforts to save people and environment-typical northern development themes. Corruption is rife, from village yokels to top-level government officials and European expats who run illegal and/or immoral moneymaking schemes. The goods at issue are rare animal species and valuable hardwoods from the Mali Kuli Reserve. The bad guys try to plunder whatever they can from Rumura's rich but diminishing natural resource base. Thuggish police Captain Kamanga, his boss, and their French partner,

Images in Legal and Fictional Texts from Qing China

Robert E. Hegel Images in Legal and Fictional Texts from Qing China Crime case reports from the Qing archives frequently contain images or written descriptions of acts of violence and their effects on the human body. By contrasting two kinds of images in these non-fictional narrative texts, tu diagrams and hui descriptions, one can see that the diagrams serve merely to reinforce and exemplify the textual descriptions of murder victims. Hui, or verbal pictures, seemingly parallel fictional narratives in their reliance on setting, plot, characterization, and dialogue. However, by comparison with crime case reports, descriptions of action in contemporary novels leave details to the reader's imagination, a narrative luxury not available to the magistrates and the legal secretaries of the Qing. Like fiction commentators, the authors of crime reports regularly informed their readers how to interpret the texts and the images they invoked.

The Soledades , Góngora's Masque of the Imagination (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 289 The Soledades, Góngora's Masque of the Imagination University of Missouri Press, 2002 By Marsha S. Collins There is an essential paradox at the heart of Marsha Collins's undertaking. Her study aims to reveal the beauty of a paradigmatic example of baroque poetry and to make it accessible to contemporary readers. This goal would seem to run counter to that of Góngora, the master of exaggerated obscurity, of linguistic intricacies, and of difficulty for its own sake, in short, of inaccessibility. The Sokdades (1614) ostensibly narrates the story of a youthful wanderer, bur in essence the poem represents the trajectory of the authors unrestrained imagination. For Collins, the writer endeavors to cast himself as the purveyor of truth, to recreate the poet-prophet (votes) of dassical antiquity who sought to divine the mysteries of the universe. Like Velazquez, Góngora exalts the artist but, at the same time, he strives to rise above the mundane, through a type of secular mysticism. He synthesizes a vast array of concepts and conventions in order to define a new poetic language, which goes far beyond the technical bravura and pure craftsmanship that critics have accentuated. It is this unique discourse that Collins, through a process that she terms cultural reconrextualization, attempts to delineate. The Sokdades marks the convergence of neoplatonism, humanism, the literature of meditation , the pastoral tradition, and natural philosophy , to cite only part of the intertext. The eternal dialectics of art and nature informs the poem, as does, significantly, the cultural frame of the court of Philip III. Featuting "unmediated and mediated admiratio" (117), the Sokdades wavers between "solitary," contemplative experience and spectacular pastoral stage production. Collins argues that at the center of the competing models lies the court masque, a performance characterized here by a figurative displacement of die monarch in favor of superior readers and spectators. She uses the Renaissance Italian garden as a blueprint for Góngora's poetics: a garden of the mind shot through with theatrical elements and references to theater that upon reflection mold themselves into a court spectacle in the guise of a literary text. This configuration to a remarkable degree assumes the shape of a masque to be performed in the reader's imagination. (199) Góngora invests his poem, designed for a courdy reader, with the hybrid formal structure of the masque. Collins notes that there is no king in Góngora's performance art and explains the absence in an ingenious manner: the author has staged a "quiet revolution in miniature in the Sokdades," replacing the monarch with the ideal reader: the viewei, actor, and interpreter par excellence, the other alchemist who must complete the transmutation of words into golden truths, who must decipher the emblems and conceits to unmask the ideas hidden within their elaborate linguistic disguises. (219) Nonetheless, Góngora reserves the primary position for himself, as poet, musician, choreographer, stage designer, and, ultimately, as spiritual guide. This is a learned, well-elaborared, and highly engaging study. Collins examines critical approaches to the Sokdades and offers a comprehensive new reading, which emulates baroque art in its play of contrasts, most notably through the dichotomy of solitude and spectacle. She combines textual analysis with a consideration of the multiple contexts of the poem, and she proposes a strategy that would justify the diverse field of associations and the constant shifts of direction and focus. More broadly, she projects an innovative view of Góngora as the creating subject, which links her work with recent studies of Cervantes, Velazquez, MarÃ-a de Zayas, and the poet's literary arch-enemy Quevedo, among others. Although my personal vision of Góngora falls somewhat short oÃ- vates—I see him as more interested in language as a source of power, and I believe that his elitism in the artistic sphere has strong social and political analogues—I find Collins's operating premises to be both intriguing and per- 290 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies suasive. Like the object of investigation, the book is nodiing if not richly textured. Edward H. Friedman Vanderbilt University Andares ciárteos: Fábulas del menor en Osvaldo...

Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Problems in the Detective Story

The detective story centres on unravelling two questions: whodunit? and who is guilty? In Murder and Mayhem, Heta Pyrhonen examines how these questions organize and pattern the genre's formal and thematic structures. Beginning with a semiotic reading of the detective as both code-breaker and sign-reader, Pyrhonen's theoretical analysis then situates the reader and the detective in parallel worlds - both use the detective genre's typical motifs in solving the crime, but do not employ the same narrative interpretations to do so. This difference is examined with the help of the familiar game analogy: while the fictional world of the criminal functions as the detective's antagonist, readers see both the detective and the criminal as the fictional masks behind which their own adversary, the author, is hiding. The reading of detective stories as complex interpretative games reveals how the genre engages the reader's formal imagination and moral judgment. Discussing a range of detective stories from works by Conan Doyle and Chesterton to Borges and Rendell, and drawing on the work of major critics - including Dennis Porter, Umberto Eco, John T. Irwin, and Slavoj Zizek - Pyrhonen offers a unique, sophisticated, and engagingly lucid analysis of a complex genre.