Biographical Reading Research Articles

Kulturel liminalitet i Don Quixote

Cervantes og den »algierske erfaring« Cultural Liminality in Don QuixoteMiguel de Cervantes’ two-volume satire from 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote de la Mancha, has often been been proclaimed the first European novel, especially by the continental theory of the novel. Most renowned in that regard is Milan Kundera’s description in The Art of the Novel of Don Quixote as the first narration in the literary history of Europe testifying to the absence of God. Thus for Kundera, Cervantes’ master piece demonstrates the close relationship between the genre of the novel, on the hand, and the rise of a scepticist, secular and worldlyminded mentality characteristic of the European Enlightenment, on the other hand. Being influenced by the general »re-historizing« of the literary studies that we are facing in these years, more recent Cervantine research has taken up topics that played a central role in the the cultural history of Golden Age Spain. Consequently, we have been witnessing a lot of studies focused on the representation of gender, ethnicity, identity politics etc. Within the frame of the cultural history approach to Don Quixote we also see examples of new biographical readings basing the literary analysis on a thorough historical reconstruction of Cervantes’ life and times, in particular with regard to his involvement in the war against the Turks. In my article »Cultural Liminality in Don Quixote. Cervantes and the Algerian experience«, I approach the question of Don Quixote as the first novel by combining the Bakhtinian theory of the novel with recent attempts at historical reconstruction.

A Dickinson Reverie: The Worm, the Snake, Marvel, and Nineteenth-Century Dreaming

Emily Dickinson's "In Winter in my Room" has been interpreted by scholars as representing her dread of and contempt for male sexuality and sex, her penis envy, her repressed incestuous desire for her brother Austin, and her fear of domination and potential violation. This article shifts attention away from such biographical readings and their psychoanalytic perspective, and reads the poem in the context of ideas about dreams available to Dickinson in her own time. It examines pre-Freudian theories of dreaming available in the journals her family is known to have read and the literary representation of dreams in novels by Dickens and the Brontës and in Ik Marvel's Reveries of a Bachelor. This approach opens out possibilities of interpretation for the poem by placing it in its cultural-historical context.

Competing Biblical and Virgilian Allusions in Wyatt's 'Who so list to hounte'

MANY critics feel that ‘Who so list to hounte’ refers to the poet's relationship with Anne Boleyn, though a critic uncomfortable with biographical reading might simply call it, as R. A. Rebholz does, ‘a free imitation of Petrarch's Rime 190’.1 It does seem natural in this case to look beyond the page to either historical speculation or allegorical significance, and Wyatt's dependence on Petrarch might point to an easy explanation of the poem's extended metaphor (deer hunt as love chase). But ‘Who so list to hounte’ is markedly different from its supposed source, and one has to allow, then, that the appropriation will promote markedly different interpretations.2 Behind biographical speculation, which seems unsupportable, and dependence on Petrarchan influence, which seems limited, there is an accessible entrance to the interpretive possibilities of the poem in line 13's simultaneous reference to Mary Magdalene's post-resurrection encounter with Christ and to the Caesarian method of marking deer.3 This line opens the way to several biblical and Virgilian allusions that bring into focus a binary ‘method’ that peaks in line 13 but is suggested syntactically and referentially throughout the poem. These allusions, not surprisingly, make the failed-romance reading inescapable, but the binaries produced both by the allusions and by the structure of the poem itself make certainty about the context of the deer–hunter relationship unattainable. And this unattainability is certainly part of Wyatt's point. The ‘despair of failure’, ‘the futility of the attempt’, the fact that each ‘huntsman will be as unsuccessful as the speaker’, the sense of ‘hopeless admiration’ are simply built into the conceit of the poem (the chase),4 but the upshot of that conceit may also be part of an intended interpretive trap.

The Silhouette and the Secret Self: Theorizing Biography in Our Times

The Silhouette and the Secret Self:Theorizing Biography in Our Times Leonard Cassuto (bio) Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. By John D'Emilio. New York: Free Press, 2003. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 564 pages. $20.00 (paper). Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism. By Elizabeth Faue. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. 249 pages. $19.95 (paper). The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. By Jerome Loving. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 480 pages. $34.95 (cloth). Frank Norris: A Life. By Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Jesse P. Crisler. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 492 pages. $38.00 (cloth). For a long time I never much enjoyed reading biographies. I'd start them with the highest of hopes and the best of intentions, but then I would bog down in the beginning chapters and put the books aside. My biographies would then drift from end table to end table until they washed up like bulky jetsam in my study. There they would languish, until after awhile I'd shelve them with mingled guilt and regret. Then I realized that I didn't have to plow through a biography straight from beginning to end. Now, because I like to locate myself in the life story right away, I usually start biographies in the middle and read the story out of chronological order. That way I begin with the part of the subject's life that presumably caused the biographer to be interested in the first place. Why don't biographers just start in the middle themselves? It turns out that this question points to methodological issues common to virtually all American studies scholars, including the problem of text and context, how they're related, and the problem of which is which. In the case of biography, the answer starts with the lingering influence of Leon Edel and the way that his model has been followed—often unthinkingly—by biographers paddling in his massive [End Page 1249] wake. Edel was not simply the author of the definitive, multivolume account of the life of Henry James. He was also the foremost theorist of biography of the last half-century. Beginning with the classic Literary Biography (1957) and extending through a series of books and articles on the subject stretching over decades, Edel outlined the biographer's craft and set forth its goal: to locate "the figure under the carpet." This conceit, whose phrasing winks at James, refers to the view of a person's outline (the visible self) in the form of bumps and lumps in the carpet. For Edel, the biographer's job is to infer what lies out of sight below, the "secret myth" that's causing that particular and individual pattern of bumps and lumps that's presented to the world. Simply put, the biographer searches for internal motivation.1 That search amounts to an excavation of the private self. Not surprisingly—given the way that he defines the task—and in keeping with the intellectual currents of his time, Edel's "most significant" digging tools are psychoanalytic.2 The biographer in Edel's mold (and there have been many who have climbed from it) accepts certain important assumptions, especially that inner motivation offers the best narrative through-line to span a life. That doesn't mean that all biographers style themselves as posthumous therapists in search of the elusive unconscious, nor that biographers didn't look for personal motivation before Freud came along, but rather that the biographer's work in the age of Freud has been governed by the general assumption, conveyed by psychoanalysis, that the truth lies beyond the rational, proceeding from the subject's distant past. This assumption generates a particular sort of biographical apparatus. The Freudian worldview assumes that the adult subject has been decisively shaped by childhood events. Freudian case studies—which Richard Ellmann calls "biographies without heroes"—center on the search for those early-life events that did the shaping.3 Certain conventions long ago became ritualized, obligatory parts of the biographical narrative in our time, and they've become frozen in place. These days we expect...

Literature, Biographism and the Communion of Saints: The Case of Jan Józef Lipski

Literature, Biographism and the Communion of Saints: The Case of Jan Józef Lipski

On Being “Tempted to Knit”: Writing, Reviewing and Reading Biography

A range of scholarship has recently broadened the contexts in which life writing can be read; the professionalisation of literature, gender, structures of editing and publishing, print history and ...

Iris Murdoch's Aesthetics of Masochism

Iris Murdoch's Aesthetics of Masochism Bran Nicol (bio) In her essay "On 'God' and 'Good,'" Iris Murdoch writes that "[i]t is always a significant question to ask of any philosopher: what is he [sic] afraid of?" (Murdoch 1999a: 359). She is considering the difficulty "in philosophy to tell whether one is saying something reasonably public and objective, or whether one is merely erecting a barrier, special to one's own temperament, against one's own personal fears" (Murdoch 1999a: 359). Her question suggests what we might regard as her own fear as a writer—and of fiction, not just philosophy: the sense that she might be fooling herself, presenting a piece of writing as objective or impersonal when it is, in fact, driven by her desire. Her main strategy for alleviating this fear is the theory of literary production she developed throughout her career. What is distinctive about Murdoch's theory of the novel is that it is also a theory of ethics. Like the good person, she maintained, a novelist should engage in the literary equivalent of ascesis, peeling away the egotistical layers of self which cling to her work to leave the representation of pure "reality"—or as close as one can get to it in art—in all its contingent glory. As she argues elsewhere in "On 'God' and 'Good,'" "[t]he chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one" (Murdoch 1999a: 347–8). The writer must resist the temptation to give in to this fantasy by featuring herself in her work or imposing pre-existing schema or judgement upon it. Characters should develop "independently" of the author and each other, and not be subservient to the demands of the plot. "[T]he greatest art," Murdoch says, "is 'impersonal' because it shows us the world, our world and not another one, with a clarity which startles and delights us simply because we are not used to looking at the real world at all" (Murdoch 1999a: 352). [End Page 148] Murdoch's official "ethics of impersonality" is reinforced at a more subtle level by the "epitextual" dimension of her work, which has the effect of underlining how faithful she was to her own theory. According to Gérard Genette, epitexts are those texts produced by authors, such as interviews, private letters and journals, etc., which do not occupy the same space as those in the main text (i.e. "peritexts," such as title, dedication, preface, postscript, etc.), but which nevertheless function to delimit and direct the readings of it. When her most important interviews are considered together1 it is remarkable how consistent Murdoch remained in her "public" pronouncements. More or less from the outset, she had developed a kind of "totalized" philosophy (though she would have disliked such a label). Murdoch's epitexts also strengthen the sense of correspondence between theory and practice in a more subtle way by making it difficult to attempt any biographical reading of her fiction. Her essays and interviews seldom feature details about her life outside her "public" roles as writer and philosopher. Recently, however, this has changed, as a result of a series of biographical portraits2 published following her death. These suggest that Murdoch's personal investment in her own fiction is much more complex than it once seemed. Previously she tended to be caricatured in public as a private, puritanical individual, almost close to a saint, a portrait of the author that complemented her theory of authorship. Now, however, she has been transformed into a quite different figure: a complex, sexualized being, capable of cruelty and deception as much as kindness and intellectual seriousness. What is striking is the way this biographical material has transformed not simply our perception of Murdoch's personality, but her writing. Murdoch has effectively been returned to her own fiction, where previously she seemed strangely absent from it. The impression that she maintained of a disciplined detachment from her own fiction now seems less persuasive. One of the clearest examples of a correspondence between life and work...

Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture Ross G. Forman (bio) Martha Stoddard Holmes , Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004); xiv+ 228 pages, hardback, $65 (ISBN 0 472 09841 1). A few years ago, I visited Cambodia on holiday. My hotel advertised an in-house massage service, carried out by an organization called Krousar Thmey. This charity was established to provide an education to local children blinded by landmines and to train them for employment in the tourist industry. These were children who would otherwise end up as a burden to their relatives, or as beggars. The experience of having my flesh kneaded by a blind young man was, of course, a 'feel-good' one in [End Page 360] all senses of the word. Not only was the massage relaxing, it was also a self-congratulatory exercise in sympathizing with the handicapped. The incident also invoked many of the feelings that Martha Stoddard Holmes shows, in Fictions of Affliction:Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, became characteristic of the way in which able-bodied people have dealt with the disabled from the nineteenth century to the present. Bringing together fiction and life narratives, Stoddard Holmes's work probes the origin of the connection between disability and emotion. The book begins by reviewing the conventions of melodrama, historicizing the imbrication of melodrama and disability on the Victorian stage. Although the extensive critical corpus around melodrama and early film might have provided her with some tools to make this analysis more theoretical, nevertheless, Stoddard Holmes convincingly shows how melodrama came to frame disability both in literary and non-literary texts and in society more generally. She then offers an analysis of representations of disabled people in the work of novelists such as Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Dinah Craik, and Charlotte M. Yonge. This section of the book focuses largely on depictions of women and their relation to conventional and unconventional marriage plots. Fictions of Afflictions moves on to deal with Victorian imaginings of disabled boys and men, drawing a distinction between innocent, child-like sufferers and those who use their disability – or counterfeit disability – in order to escape work. Here, Stoddard Holmes draws effective contrasts between Victorian moral censure of begging and historical information showing just how difficult it was for disabled men to remain independent, especially if they hailed from the working classes. Examining the administrators of the Poor Laws and the philosophy guiding organizations such as the Charity Organization Society, Stoddard Holmes uncovers the class biases that made them see disabled people of humble social origins as, in effect, guilty of their own destitution – if not their disability itself. She foregrounds the need for Victorian sympathizers to see disability in terms of the productive economy and to gain pleasure from charitable acts, just as I did in supporting, on a minute scale, the disabled poor of Cambodia. Stoddard then contrasts these views with a chapter reading biographies and autobiographies of Victorians with disabilities (principally the blind and the deaf). This chapter balances narratives of the lower-class disabled as recorded by Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor (1861-2) with life writings by Harriet Martineau, John Kitto, Henry Fawcett, and Elizabeth Gilbert. This material, while fascinating, is also undertheorized, and it ignores many of the insights of recent work on subjectivity and life writing in Victorian studies scholarship. [End Page 361] Fictions of Affliction concludes by reminding readers that it is a rare person indeed who will not experience disability during their lifetime – either their own or that of a friend or relative. She appeals to scholars to incorporate disability into 'our taxonomies of "difference" and our concomitant training of students as critical, questioning readers of literature and culture. These are not intellectual games but essential learning for anyone who has a body' (195). It is therefore all the more striking that her analysis ignores what my experience with the blind masseur in Cambodia reveals: that the continuity between Victorian attitudes towards disability and the West's own often lies in the way we treat the developing world, 'stuck' as it is in what...

Stirring Up Justice: Adolescents Reading, Writing, and Changing the World

Teaching a diverse population of adolescents to be writers, readers, and active citizens requires fundamental changes in curriculum development, teaching strategies, and student roles in the classroom. In this article, two educators report on their collaboration in an urban high school in Portland, Oregon, USA, to create a classroom where students of diverse backgrounds learned to ask critical questions, to support one another, and to work toward positive social change. Curriculum and teaching in this classroom were choreographed around one central theme: social activism. The authors designed a project in which students worked toward creating positive social change. By sharing their individual projects as they prepared them in and out of class, students learned that activism is not a solo process and that influencing change grows with support and camaraderie. Using a range of literacy activities, including reading biographies of activists, creating gallery displays, writing essays, revising written work, interviewing activists, and teaching other class members, the students learned the power of using their literacy to make changes in the world.

The Public and Private in C.Wright Mills’s Life and Work

Charles Wright Mills revitalized sociology’s focus on the public–private distinction and this article offers a biographical reading of these writings by locating them in the turmoil of his private life. The article thus looks at the public–private distinction as it manifested in the public writings and private life of one of the major theorists of this theme. Its central argument is that we need to reposition Mills’s intellectual biography by locating it spatially, for his sociological writings on this theme were heavily influenced by the ‘spaces of selfhood’ within which he lived and worked.This connects intellectual biography with the spatial turn in sociology. The purpose of such intellectual biography, however, is not merely to fill in the background of a sociologist’s life, but to provide materials that take us to the centre of the sociological enterprise itself. It is argued that Mills’s ‘spaces of selfhood’ are a medium into understanding his whole vision of sociology.

Thomas Wolfe's Civil War ed. by David Madden (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS REVIEWS David Madden, ed. Thomas Wolfe's Civil War. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004, 224 pages. Paperback. $19.95 When Maxwell Perkins accepted the manuscript for what would eventually become known as Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe's first novel, one of the major cuts he required to reduce the novel by 90,000 words was the book's opening scene, which recounted W. O. Gant's boyhood experience of watching Confederate soldiers march into Pennsylvania on their way to the Battle of Gettysburg. While many allusions to the Civil War pepper the bildungsroman, none offer a sustained depiction of the war's effect on the Gant family, the autobiographical counterpart of Wolfe's own. Even though cutting this material made a more tightly structured novel, Perkins' intention, it also concealed a major theme of Wolfe's, which explores the effects of the Civil War on his own life, on the Southern character, and on America's post-bellum destiny. This important but rarely published episode makes up the first of nine selections included in Thomas Wolfe's Civil War by David Madden, well-known Civil War novelist, scholar, and professor at Louisiana State University, who edited the volume wanting to offer a fresh examination of Wolfe "as a major contributor to Civil War literature". While the texts collected support Madden's thesis that Wolfe's "Civil War pieces might be counted among his greatest achievements," the wide range of genres included also illustrate the extent of Wolfe's range and versatility as a fiction writer. Besides episodes from the novels Of Time and the River, The Web of Earth, and The Good Child's River, Madden also includes sections from the author's last completed play, Mannerhouse, as well as four short stories: "The Four Lost Men,"""His Father's Earth,"""Chickamauga," and The Plumed Knight." While all of Wolfe's texts receive full biographical and critical discussion in the book's fifty-page introduction, Madden offers especial insight into the experimental complexity of "The Four Lost Men," which "no distinct genre exists to accommodate" (25), and Act Four of Mannerhouse, an early work that presents more than any other Wolfe's "lifelong preoccupation with the Civil War" (19). While most critics have traditionally maligned these pieces on aesthetic grounds, 76 Madden offers fresh biographical readings within an historical context that may lead a critical reassessment of both works. What is most exciting about Thomas Wolfe's Civil War is that it offers a short yet diverse collection of the author's fiction at an affordable price for students. Those teachers who have neglected Wolfe because the length of his novels are unfriendly to classroom time constraints or because the 600-page'Collected Short Stories costs too much to justify course inclusion now have a reader-friendly text that can be adopted for a wide range of American literature and history courses. The lay-reader will find the same rhetorical gusto, youthful enthusiasm, and modernist vision that have kept Wolfe's work in print since their initial publication over seventy years ago. Madden's book offers a fresh perspective from which to read Wolfe, a contribution to American literary scholarship that, along with Rob Ensign's "Lean Down Your Ear upon the Earth and Listen: Thomas Wolfe's Greener Modernism, may spearhead the author's canonical revival. —Shawn Holliday 77 ...

Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Novel in Spain (review)

534 Reviews One of the many unquestionable merits of her ambitious study is that by defining for fellow scholars a distinctive area of novel-writing she opens the door to further re? search, provoking new readings ofworks in a narrative formof rich social significance. University of Valladolid Maria Jesus Garcia Garrosa Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Novel in Spain. By Elisa Marti-Lopez. London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 193 pp. ?22.02. ISBN 0-8387-5520-8. This book concerns two fundamentally important and interrelated aspects of literary life in mid-nineteenth-century Spain: the writing and publication of socially con? cerned misteriosinspired by Sue, and the prominence of (often quite free) translations of foreign works. As Elisa Marti-Lopez points out, both of these have been neglec? ted because they are considered detrimental to the development of modern Spanish culture, rather than as serious contributions to the emergence of the modern novel. In Marti-Lopez's view, the dependence of criticism on models of strong originality conspires against an appreciation of Spaniards' dialogistic engagement with foreign models and of subtler forms of differencefrom and similarity to non-Spanish cultures. The author argues that Spanish intellectuals were faced with two key problems: the turbulent establishment of a Liberal state and corresponding nation-building, and the hegemony of Paris and London as European publishing centres, based around an author-publisher relationship, and exporting heavily to foreign markets (like Spain). The pursuit of modern forms of culture and politics required emulation and depen? dence; national identity, and distinct circumstances, required difference. Such were the conditions within which the dialogue with Sue's mysterestook place. In saying this, Marti-Lopez rightlyemphasizes that Spanish culture ofthe mid-nineteenth cen? tury was not dominated by Conservative nationalism; nor was interest in the mysteres confined to the Left. This book does not, however, provide an interpretation of many Spanish misterios. Given that the genre was often cultivated by leftists, as Marti-Lopez says, it seems peculiar that the only two texts to receive extended consideration are by Conserva? tive Liberals (Cortada's translation of Les Mysteres de Paris, Mila de la Roca's Los misterios de Barcelona). In terms of the wider panorama, Progressive concern with culture as a vehicle of the public good is discussed, but not connected to a political philosophy that had moved on from the Enlightenment. Perhaps in consequence, Marti-Lopez's threefold equation of Schlegel's legacy, Conservatism, and the idea of a national spirit, all supposedly opposed to the misterios,misrepresents the complex exchanges of ideas in Spain. None the less, this book is a welcome contribution to and rectification of modern Spanish literary history. University of Edinburgh Andrew Ginger Between theMaternal Aegis and theAbyss: Woman as Symbol in thePoetry ofRosalia de Castro. By Michelle C. Geoffrion-Vinci. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dick? inson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 161 pp. ?24.95. ISBN 0-8386-3913-5. This is a brave book, but its argument is not entirely convincing because of the author's tendency to slip into biographical readings of Rosalia de Castro's poetry and ...

(review)

534 Reviews One of the many unquestionable merits of her ambitious study is that by defining for fellow scholars a distinctive area of novel-writing she opens the door to further re? search, provoking new readings ofworks in a narrative formof rich social significance. University of Valladolid Maria Jesus Garcia Garrosa Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Novel in Spain. By Elisa Marti-Lopez. London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 193 pp. ?22.02. ISBN 0-8387-5520-8. This book concerns two fundamentally important and interrelated aspects of literary life in mid-nineteenth-century Spain: the writing and publication of socially con? cerned misteriosinspired by Sue, and the prominence of (often quite free) translations of foreign works. As Elisa Marti-Lopez points out, both of these have been neglec? ted because they are considered detrimental to the development of modern Spanish culture, rather than as serious contributions to the emergence of the modern novel. In Marti-Lopez's view, the dependence of criticism on models of strong originality conspires against an appreciation of Spaniards' dialogistic engagement with foreign models and of subtler forms of differencefrom and similarity to non-Spanish cultures. The author argues that Spanish intellectuals were faced with two key problems: the turbulent establishment of a Liberal state and corresponding nation-building, and the hegemony of Paris and London as European publishing centres, based around an author-publisher relationship, and exporting heavily to foreign markets (like Spain). The pursuit of modern forms of culture and politics required emulation and depen? dence; national identity, and distinct circumstances, required difference. Such were the conditions within which the dialogue with Sue's mysterestook place. In saying this, Marti-Lopez rightlyemphasizes that Spanish culture ofthe mid-nineteenth cen? tury was not dominated by Conservative nationalism; nor was interest in the mysteres confined to the Left. This book does not, however, provide an interpretation of many Spanish misterios. Given that the genre was often cultivated by leftists, as Marti-Lopez says, it seems peculiar that the only two texts to receive extended consideration are by Conserva? tive Liberals (Cortada's translation of Les Mysteres de Paris, Mila de la Roca's Los misterios de Barcelona). In terms of the wider panorama, Progressive concern with culture as a vehicle of the public good is discussed, but not connected to a political philosophy that had moved on from the Enlightenment. Perhaps in consequence, Marti-Lopez's threefold equation of Schlegel's legacy, Conservatism, and the idea of a national spirit, all supposedly opposed to the misterios,misrepresents the complex exchanges of ideas in Spain. None the less, this book is a welcome contribution to and rectification of modern Spanish literary history. University of Edinburgh Andrew Ginger Between theMaternal Aegis and theAbyss: Woman as Symbol in thePoetry ofRosalia de Castro. By Michelle C. Geoffrion-Vinci. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dick? inson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 161 pp. ?24.95. ISBN 0-8386-3913-5. This is a brave book, but its argument is not entirely convincing because of the author's tendency to slip into biographical readings of Rosalia de Castro's poetry and MLR, 100.2, 2005 535 the lack of a sufficiently developed theoretical framework to sustain such a radical rereading. Nevertheless, Michelle C. Geoffrion-Vinci is to be congratulated for tak? ing Castro criticism in new and exciting directions. After providing an informative overview of critical studies to date, the author rightly draws attention to the curious fact that gender in Castro's poetry has yet to be examined in depth. This book aims to make good the lack by focusing on female symbolism, in particular the figureofthe mother. This includes examining the relationship between female procreativity and literary creativity; the maternal body and the concept of fertility;matriarchy and na? tionalism; veil imagery and spiritual redemption; and Christian symbolism employed to celebrate female desire. The scope ofthe study ranges across Castro's poetry, from A mi madre (1862) to En las orillas del Sar (1884). The book begins by making connections between Castro's poetry and end-ofcentury French symbolism, the point being that, although Castro's imagery is to a large extent conventional, it...

The Meanings of "Beauty and The Beast:" A Handbook (review)

Reviewed by: The Meanings of "Beauty and The Beast:" A Handbook Ruth Carver Capasso (bio) The Meanings of "Beauty and The Beast:" A Handbook. By Jerry Griswold. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2004 Jerry Griswold opens his study of "Beauty and the Beast" with a quote from Italo Calvino's Why Read the Classics: "What counts for us in a work of literature is the possibility of being able to continue to unpeel it like a never-ending artichoke, discovering more and more new dimensions in reading." After years of studying and teaching the tale, Griswold presents his explorations of this multi-faceted text and offers the reader a variety of versions, thoughtful commentaries, and models of text analysis. Madame LePrince de Beaumont's version of "Beauty and the Beast" is taken as a "touchstone;" after retelling the tale in his own words, Griswold analyzes the key characters of the story. He offers a biographical reading by relating Beauty's hesitation facing her fearful suitor with the contemporary practice of arranged marriages from which Beaumont herself suffered. To demonstrate psychological interpretations he discusses Jungian applications of the concepts of anima and animus and Bruno Bettelheim's Freudian reading. Griswold challenges the tendency of psychological critics to look at the [End Page 272] story principally in terms of Beauty and her "problem" with relationships, arguing that Beast also undergoes transition and may symbolize an equal need for male maturation. He also challenges the strictly heterosexual reading of male/female relationships only that ignore the same-sex relationships in the tale. The approach of historical criticism to the tale is represented by Jack Zipes' analysis of class struggle enacted between the aristocratic Beast and the nouveau riche merchant family. Griswold briefly traces the development in feminist readings from the first generation that rejected the story as promoting the image of a self-sacrificial daughter submitted to patriarchal desires to more recent readings that celebrate Beauty's willingness to celebrate her own sexuality. As he traces versions of folk and fairy tales that include the animal groom, Griswold recalls the morphological approach of Vladimir Propp by delineating five "acts," or core elements, of the stories. In the recurrence of stories involving a marriage to an Other, Griswold sees attempts to address exogamy, or marrying outside the normative group structure. Perhaps the most delightful part of the handbook is the collection of illustrations and the analysis that accompanies them. Griswold suggests that the story can be seen as a "reverse Rorschach test" (9), revealing how artists conceive beauty and bestiality. Griswold offers twenty-four images from nineteenth-century versions such as Ford's Blue Fairy Book (1889) to contemporary versions by Mercer Mayer (1978). In his analysis, Griswold presents a sensitive reading of the visual language of the selected illustrations, alerting the reader to details such as claw-footed furniture, motifs in the clothing of the characters, and how the posing of the figures and the characters' eye contact (or aversion) help to tell a story firmly grounded in issues of "seeing." While each of the illustrated versions might appear to be intended for children, Griswold contrasts some portraying Beauty as childlike (Gordon Brown, 1919; Jessie Wilcox, 1911; and Margaret Evans Price, 1921) with others, such as those by Walter Crane ( 1875), that include erotic symbolism only accessible to adults. This chapter could have led to a discussion of the dual audience of the tale, not only in art but throughout centuries of variation. Regrettably, Griswold contents himself with noting whatever readership seems to be addressed with each version, without wrestling with the issue of borders between child and adult literature that so often arises in the study of folk and fairy tales. Yet the chapter is undoubtedly a success in that it leaves the reader wishing to track down these and other versions in order to pursue the history of illustration of this or other fairy tales. Griswold does not limit his study to written texts; his discussion includes references to televised versions, such as the Beauty and the Beast TV series. An entire chapter is devoted to two film versions: Cocteau's classic from 1946 and Disney's 1991 animated film. This chapter...

Beauty Raises the Dead: Literature and Loss in the Fin de Siecle (review)

Reviewed by: Beauty Raises the Dead: Literature and Loss in the Fin de Siècle Rachel L. Mesch Robert Ziegler . Beauty Raises the Dead: Literature and Loss in the Fin de Si`cle. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002. 189 pp. In Beauty Raises the Dead: Literature and Loss in the Fin de Siècle, Robert Ziegler uses psychoanalytic theories of mourning to analyze the relationship between decadent authors' melancholy and the art they produced. Instead of seeing decadent literature as simply a product of the melancholic imagination, Ziegler argues that the fundamental experience of decadent creativity was part of a complex process of mourning; the work of art itself thus comes to compensate for the loss it works through. The limits of this process—and the obstacles it creates for the artist—are what distinguish the work of individual decadent authors as they struggle to come to terms with their competing desires. Ziegler's study, which brings together thoughtful readings of texts by such writers as Lorrain, Rachilde, Villiers, Mirbeau and Huysmans among others, seeks in part to offer a new definition of a movement that has often eluded simple categories. For Ziegler, the decadent text grapples with the cycles of life—birth, childhood, aging, loss, death—at the same time as it struggles with the processes of invention and creativity. He writes: "In embracing the pain of separation, killing the past, and mourning continuously, the Decadents found the inspiration to keep themselves alive in art" (262). Through Ziegler's psychoanalytic optic, which draws on Melanie Klein, Freud, and several others, decadence defines itself as a depressive child in opposition to naturalism, the parent it has rejected, and its texts work through that traumatic relationship. Although this paradigm might appear to suggest an Oedipal rejection of paternal authority, it is paradoxically the loss of the mother that Ziegler traces most expansively in his reading of some of decadence's most provocative texts. In a chapter on Villiers and Rodenbach, Ziegler explores the use of what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok call incorporation (a glossary of psychoanalytic terms can be found in the back to help through the scientific vocabulary), a process by which loss is addressed through an attempt to incorporate its object into the ego in order to make it part of the self. Ziegler uses this notion to read the obsession with dead women in Villier's "Véra" and Rodenbach's "Bruges-la-Morte," an obsession that works through the original and universal maternal loss that all children experience. Villiers, through [End Page 133] the character of the Count d'Athol, ultimately repudiates the dissatisfying illusion of incorporation, while for Rodenbach, incorporation attests to the value of a life whose loss is irreconcilable. The art that remains, on the other hand, transforms trauma into beauty. The other chapters also pair up texts: chapter three brings together Rachilde's La Jongleuse with Lorrain's Monsieur de Bougrelon in an exploration of matricide; chapter four studies creation in Mendès and Schwab; and the final chapter reads Huysmans with Mirbeau in a discussion of art and utopias. In many cases, Ziegler draws on the authors' personal histories to further his psychoanalytic readings of the characters they created. Rodenbach's childhood exposure to death explains his hero's torment, and Rachilde's promotion of female sexual autonomy in La Jongleuse is seen as a reaction to her mother's attempts to subvert her own daughter's success. Ziegler's broad psychoanalytic strokes sometimes leave questions open. It seems to me, for example, that the relationship to the loss of the mother that fuels all of Ziegler's readings might not be the most operative paradigm for Rachilde—the lone woman writer in a male authorized tradition, whose troubled relationship with her father seems as relevant to her writing as her mother's disapproval. The author's gender in this case ought to significantly alter the Freudian dynamic that Ziegler has identified at the heart of the decadent project. Likewise, it seems counter-intuitive that Huysmans's rebellious relationship to naturalism, and particularly to Emile Zola, is also filtered through the biographical reading of the former's troubled relationship towards...

Beckett and Philosophy by Richard Lane (review)

178 Reviews writer?excessive, bawdy and satirical?when banged up forlife in a Victorian world. This was how he survived' (p. 144). But John Clare: A Literary Life is not just a clever attempt to remove Clare from the visionary gleam of Wordsworthian Romanticism and recontextualize him as a lifelong Regency poet. Sales draws heavily on six volumes of letters addressed to Clare, most of which are unpublished, and cross-references these with Clare's own letters and other material on Regency patronage and publishing, thus expanding our understanding of Clare's promotion and reception. Sidestepping the 'to punctuate or not to punctuate' battle, Sales asks us to accept that 'there are just differenttexts, all of interest, rather than one sacred object' (p. 70). The best aspect of this biography, though, is the emphasis throughout on Clare's sheer dedication to writing. Although there was only a brief period when his writing reached the public, Clare always wrote, even throughout the asylum years. Sales finishes with Clare's acknowledgement of his loss of expectations in the famous poem 'I am' (in which, paradoxically, Clare conquers despair by asserting that he 'is'), and quite rightlyreminds us that, afterall and amazingly, 'I am' also asserts itself as a poem and that 'this [. . .] writer survived hell on earth by never quite accepting that [his] expectations were over' (p. 163). Duncan Wu's Wordsworth: An Inner Life, almost inevitably, suffers by compari? son. Wu's central thesis is that 'Grief was the making of Wordsworth' (p. 1). This is explored through an odd kind of speculation, which might be called 'psychoanalytical ' were it more closely related to the work of, say, Freud or Klein. But Wu is 'not attempting a Freudian reading of Wordsworth; others have done that, and with greater expertise' (p. 15), and we are leftwith a quasi-psychoanalytical examination of Wordsworth's own self-examination. The result is that questions such as 'Why, then, should the 16 -year-old [orphaned] Wordsworth have equated imaginative vision with redemption from death? Why was he concerned with death at all?' (p. 22) become almost redundant, or are necessarily given incomplete psychological explanations, such as 'Their deaths must at times have felt like abandonment' (p. 76). The 'inner life' promise of the title, then, is problematical, but this is overcome by some illuminating biographical readings of Wordsworth's work, including the often neglected 'The Vale of Esthwaite', 'Descriptive Sketches', and 'The Borderers '. There is also a suggestive exploration ofthe negative effectson Wordsworth of Coleridge'senthusiasmfor 'The Recluse'. The most important aspect of Wordsworth: An Inner Life, however, is a reading of the fragmentary 1808 version of 'The White Doe of Rylstone' (which is helpfully printed in an appendix). Finally, the book con? tains nineteen reproductions of manuscripts which enable readers, through peering at Wordsworth's cramped crossings-out and emendations, to begin to appreciate the vast effortthat editors, such as Duncan Wu, expend on our behalf. University of Reading Myra Cottingham Beckett and Philosophy. Ed. by Richard Lane. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. x+184 pp. ?37-50- ISBN 0-333-91879-7. In true Beckettian fashion the contributors to this collection of essays have difnculty in starting and difnculty in finishing. In each case an effortis made to bring a modern philosopher's thought to bear on something of Beckett's; after an introduction and two general essays, the philosophers thus employed are a good selection of the usual suspects: Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Habermas, Heidegger, Nietzsche. The question today, and this makes the volume topical and interesting, is whether the current poststructuralist Beckett will give place to some post-poststructuralist version of himself and ifso, under the aegis of which thinkers? MLR, 99.1, 2004 179 So here we are beyond the Descartes, Berkeley, and Wittgenstein of early Beckett criticism and involved neither with Schopenhauer nor with existentialism. We have moved on. The matter in hand now concerns the question how postfoundational is Beckett? Or is there something more that he also is? The essays that take up this matter here do so with mixed success. On the whole the good essays are the comprehensible ones. The others are...

“This Book of Ours”: The Crisis of Authorship and Joseph Heller’s Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man

Intertexts, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2003 T h i s B o o k o f O u r s ” : T h e C r i s i s o f Authorship and Joseph Heller’s Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man Laura Elena Savu U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O R T H C A R O L I N A , G R E E N S B O R O Iwant to cap my career with amasterpiece of some kind, even agreat very small one. Iwant to crown my end with applause, to go out on anote of triumph. Like an athlete dying young, but my race finally run. (Heller 229) Made by Eugene Pota, the protagonist of Joseph Heller’s posthumous novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000), the above statement projects the nagging desire for recognition that most artists share and the elusive dream of self-fulfillment that they all cherish.An elderly novelist des¬ perately seeking asource of inspiration for afinal masterpiece, one that wouldnotreplicatehisearlierbook,PotaemergesasHeller’sownfictional persona,his“self-portrait.”JustasPota’sreputationrestsmainlyonhisfirst landmarknovel,soHeller’sisgenerallylinkedwithCatch-22(1961).Ina 1998 interview with Charlie Reilley, Heller made clear that “[t]o write, I needanewidea,acomplicatedidea—^notanimitationofsomethingIve already done.”i Thus, the question that arises, for Heller and Pota alike, is how to escape tautology, how to avoid repeating what other texts (including their own) have said. Indeed, astrong sense of either “been-there-done-that” or “beenthere -read-that” fuels Pota’s writing anxiety, which is also increased by the inescapablerecognitionthattheonsetofoldagepresages“closingtime”for him.2Thesourceofthiscrisislies,asRolandBartheshasfamouslyargued,in the fact that the writer “can only imitate agesture that is only anterior, never original.Hisonlypoweristomixwritings,tocountertheoneswiththeoth¬ ers,insuchawayasnevertorestonanyofthem”{Ima£[e146).Itisthisrest¬ lessnessthatPotadisplaysas,havingreachedastillpointinhiscareerand h e i s n e w being faced yet again with the challenge of writing something ‘new, striving, against all odds, for imaginative autonomy. “Why must every book be acompletely different one?” asks Paul, one of Pota’s editors. “It’s how Iam, Iguess,” Pota answers timidly. “It’s the way we are” (228). The research that Pota does into the biographies of other writers yields the dis¬ turbing and “singular fact about the creation of fiction,” namely that “it does turn more, not less difficult with seasoning and accomplishment” (20). Wavering between optimism and despair, he seems to resolve the crisis, this “stagnant, moribund paralysis” (21) in the very act of writing about it.^ 7 2 I N T E R T E X T S In what follows, Iexamine Heller’s notion and practice of authorship in Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man—a novel that joins the postmodern conversation at the intersection of intertextuality and metatextuality. These two postmodern trademarks converge in the recurring phrase “this book of ours,” which invokes the fascinating, indeed obsessive, presence of other writers—models to be embraced but also challenged—at the same time that it suggests the reader’s active implication in the creative process with the w r i t e r . My project is threefold; first, Iwill seek to demonstrate how die authorprotagonist of Portrait practices rewriting not to do away with authorship completely but rather to regain ahumanistic sense of identity in atragic moment of his life. Secondly, since Heller conceives of Pota’s rewritings as self-conscious undertakings, Iwill turn to specific textual instances that fore¬ ground both authorial invention and intervention. Finally, Iwill probe the implications that biographical reading brings to bear on the crisis of author¬ ship. Drawing on Frederic Regard’s essay “The Ethics of Biographical Read¬ ing,” which purports to reconcile the deconstructive and pragmatic approaches to the notion of authorship,^ Iwill show how Porfra/f emphasizes the personal dynamics at work in the artists’ creative endeavors, their essential humanity, which, Heller believes, is ultimately as valuable as their art. The Writer and the Already Written Agreat created work of art cannot be plagiaristic any more than it can be original. Its connection to the world ultimately depends upon its capacity to celebrate what already exists in ways that invent what docs not yet exist. (Highwater 65) In his study of...

Verbal Society: Poetry and Poets at the End of the Twentieth Century

This epigraph, the inspiration for my title, gives us a condensed version of one possible attitude toward poetry; an approach that situates poetic language not as outside of, but as part of a community of discourses. This is William Rowe's method in Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life (and I borrow the quote from him). Rowe reads a constellation of poets who shift poetry's conventional boundaries to use their work as a means of thinking through contemporary issues; in the process, they alter our expectations as readers. All of the books under review form another kind of society of words, through the association of poets and critical approaches to poetry from the last several years. Their approaches to the genre range from traditional, author-centered biographical readings (Daniel R. Reedy on

The Ethics of Biographical Reading: A Pragmatic Approach

The Ethics of Biographical Reading: A Pragmatic Approach

The Ethics of Biographical Reading: A Pragmatic Approach

Journal Article The Ethics of Biographical Reading: A Pragmatic Approach Get access Frédéric Regard Frédéric Regard Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume XXIX, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 394–408, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/XXIX.4.394 Published: 01 April 2000