Romantic Elements Research Articles

Conjuring the Curse of Repetition or “ Sleeping Beauty ” Revamped : Angela Carter’s Vampirella and The Lady of the House of Love*

This article illustrates Angela Carter’s literary practice through her utilization of “ Sleeping Beauty ” in the radio play Vampirella and its prose variation The Lady of the House of Love. It argues that Carter vampirised European culture as she transfused old stories into new bodies to give them new life and bite. Her experiments with forms, genres and mediums in her vampire fiction capture the inherent hybridity of the fairy tale as it sheds new light on her main source, Charles Perrault’s La Belle au bois dormant, bringing to the fore the horror and terror as well as the textual ambiguities of the French conte that were gradually obscured in favor of the romance element. Carter’s vampire stories thus trace the “ dark ” underside of the reception of the tale in Gothic fiction and in the subculture of comic books and Hammer films so popular in the 1970s, where the Sleeping Beauty figure is revived as a femme fatale or vamp who takes her fate in her own hands.

The Myths and Misconceptions of Jewish Linguistics

David M. Bunis, ed. Language.) and Literatures of Sephardic and Oriental Jews: Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress for Research on the Sep hard i and Oriental Heritage. Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute and Misgav Yerushalayim, 2009. Pp. 482 (in English, Spanish, French) and 434 pages (in Hebrew).Frank Alvarez- Pereyre and Jean Baumgarten, eds. Linguistique des langues juives et linguistique generale. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2003. Pp. AA7 (with two articles in English).John JVIyhill. Language in Society: Towards a New Understanding . Clevedon-Buffalo-Toronto: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2004. Pp. ix + 239.The three books here under review consist of two collections of studies in a number of and one discussion of the role of in societies. All three, especially the two collective works, make ample reference to Max Weinreich 's Geshikhtefun der y id L) her shprakh. 1 The two collective works continue the tradition of comparative treatments of that began in the 1930s.2The three volumes also contain numerous mentions of my article Jewish Interlinguistics: Facts and Conceptual Framework Language 57 [1981]: 99-149), which was inspired by Weinreich 's magnum opus. However, since 1981, I have radically altered my views on languages. In my 1981 article, I accepted Weinreich 's premise that most were connected to each other through successive acts of language shift, leading back to colloquial Hebrew, for example, Yiddish replaced Judeo-French and Judeo-Italian which in turn replaced Judeo- Latin and Judeo-Greek, the successors of the Judeo-Aramaic and Hebrew speech communities of the biblical period. It is true that there are unique (Judeo-) Romance elements in Yiddish and a handful of Judeo-Greek elements in some Judeo-Romance languages, but these facts can reflect language contact as well as substratal influences. There is also no reason to think that the presence of a community in a single location in successive historical periods automatically implies generational links between those very communities. For example, there is no evidence that Romance-speaking Jews in pre-eighth-century Spain are the ancestors of Romance-speaking Jews in Spain in the thirteenth century. A consequence of the assertion that cannot be placed on an unbroken chain of language shift leading back to old colloquial Hebrew is that the Hebrew component of cannot provide straightforward clues to the reconstruction of old colloquial Palestinian Hebrew. I also accepted Weinreich's assumption that were acts of linguistic creativity intended to support the unique religion and culture of the Jews and to replace obsolete colloquial Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic.I now believe that the importance of an unbroken chain of language shift leading back to Hebrew was grossly exaggerated, since it emerges that most were created independently of preexisiting (e.g., Judezmo [Judeo- Spanish] arose centuries after the demise of colloquial Latin, and there are doubts about the very existence of a Judeo- Latin). Moreover, my research in Yiddish and Judezmo have convinced me that they were in fact created by recent Irano-TurkoSlavic and Berber converts to Judaism, respectively. If that is the case, then the big question is whether collective studies of Jewish languages have any raison d'etre; if they do, what should the goal of such collective studies be?The use of the Biblical Hebrew term adhkenaz (Scythians) as a selfdesignation of Yiddish-speaking Jews is a dramatic clue to the largely Iranian ethnic origin of the biggest community in the world, yet the historical facts are almost universally denied. The term has in fact gone through a number of semantic changes: (a) ashkenaz = Iranian: David ben Avraham ai-Fasi, a Karaite philologist from Fez, wrote in the tenth century that Ashkenaz was the man from whom the Khazars descended, while another Karaite, Josef ben Burhan, wrote in the same century that Khazars were Ashkenazim. …

O obecności ideału romantyczności we współczesnych związkach miłosnych

Love and models of loving relationships constitute an important field of analysis for the contemporary sociology of individuals. Models of loving also illustrate the wide changes that have taken place in the culture of Western individualism and in the predominant value system. Some critics of this culture, like Zygmunt Bauman or Ulrich Beck, argue that romantic love has become outdated and has been replaced by relationships treated instrumentally by lovers, and managed with the rules which resemble the logic of the market. This paper contains a comparison of the romantic love code and Giddens’ confluent love code. By demonstrating the similarities and differences between them, the author answers the question about the influence of the romantic ideal on the contemporary model of love and relationships. She argues that the confluent love code includes many romantic elements, adapted to the cultural reality of the new middle class. Other elements, incompatible with values of this culture, are subjected to processes of commodification and used by consumers’ market.

Life and Death in Naples

Life and Death in Naples Leslie Richardson (bio) The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples, by Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller. (University of Chicago Press, 2008. Illustrated. 128 pages. $13) Among the glorious cities of Italy, Naples may be the least attractive to modern tourists—and for good reason. On a packaged itinerary Naples means a mediocre meal near the port where empty streets, blowing litter, and a view of the lumpish Castel Nuovo in the foreground dampen one’s spirits. Good humor will be restored the next day at Pompeii or Capri or Sorrento when travelers depart for those loveable Italian towns where pleasure is predictable and pickpockets, homicidal traffic, and garbage collection are somewhat under control. There is nothing new about the discomfort and danger that Naples has in store for outsiders—everyone not born there being thus defined. The Decameron has a tale of a callow youth who comes down from Perugia to the Angevin capital and falls into a waking nightmare simply because he had fingered his purseful of golden florins in full view of the marketplace. Nowadays the fannypack has made this impulsive gesture next to impossible, but anxiety is kept at the simmer by locals who constantly warn one to conceal everything snatchable and to return to the hotel before nightfall. Of course, nothing deters a traveler prepared to risk any adversity in hopes of revelation or adventure. Shirley Hazzard, the Australian novelist who has loved the city for sixty years, is one of a long line of distinguished visitors like Boccaccio, Dickens, Goethe, and Byron who have come down to Naples from the north and found the destination worth the trouble. The Ancient Shore, Shirley Hazzard’s new book of selected essays buttressed with a piece by her husband, Francis Steegmuller, is a love letter to Naples. Like someone who introduces a glamorous but unacceptable, even dangerous, lover to the folks at home, Hazzard acknowledges that on a certain level Naples is logically indefensible. Its sinister quality is at least a part of the attraction. In her novel The Bay of Noon she describes a young English-woman, like herself, who is struck by the odd beauty of her apartment overlooking the bay and Vesuvius. She calls the place uncanny, eccentric, “with something of the sinister that is the authentic element of romance.” Shirley Hazzard grew up in Sydney, but soon after the war her father moved the family to Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and England. Shirley Hazzard left London for Naples in 1956 to take a job with nato. Like Boccaccio, who was sent there by his father to learn about banking, Hazzard found her assignment profoundly uncongenial. She was a translator of military documents and would later write a novel (People in Glass Houses) satirizing the nato bureaucracy based on that experience. She was in her twenties when she first saw Naples; Boccaccio was barely fifteen. Both were blessed with the luxury of solitude in a strange and complex city. Both were surely [End Page ci] endowed with what Hazzard calls “the reading mind and the aroused imagination,” qualities which guaranteed that official assignments would be intolerable; but Naples itself would forever haunt their minds and inform their art. Boccaccio managed to linger in the city for fifteen years until his father forced him to return to Florence. He revisited it twice in later life but was unable to recapture the joy of his youth. Shirley Hazzard stayed with the nato job for only a year, but she still spends some of her time in Capri, well within the orbit of Vesuvius. The Ancient Shore is a selection of her dispatches on selected topics (the G7 Conference, Vesuvius, the headland of Posillipo) previously published in the New Yorker and elsewhere. They are meditations on the paradox of Naples, its extraordinary beauty rendered uneasy by deceptiveness, its rewards inseparable from its frustrations. She says it is only natural that a city made up of neighborhoods will elude the tourist who typically looks for a centro storico for his bearings. If there is one center to the city, she says, it would be the Spaccanapoli district, the “split of Naples,” but it is...

Transcending Time: Elements of Romanticism in the Thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchk

There is by now a fairly large secondary literature on the thought of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik. For very good reason, scholars speak of Neo-Kantian and Existentialist phases or dimensions of his theological writings. Thus, Halakhic Man shows the influence of Neo-Kantianism on R. Soloveitchik—hardly surprising, since he wrote his dissertation on that school of thought. Later writings, such as Lonely Many of Faith, and many others, bear a profoundly Existentialist imprint. What I shall argue here is that the impact of yet another movement in Western intellectual and literary history finds its expression in R. Soloveitchik’s writings, especially in his sermons, in those intellectual essays which share sermon-like qualities, and in his eulogies. That movement is Romanticism, and my contention is that R. Soloveitchik, the man and his writings, can be better understood if they are examined not only from Neo-Kantian and Existentialist perspectives, but from the Romantic perspective as well.

Romantic Recognition in Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven

Romantic Recognition in Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven Michèle Rackham (bio) Gwethalyn graham’s novel Earth and High Heaven is one of Canada’s great literary success stories: in addition to winning the Governor General’s award in 1944, this popular romance was the first Canadian novel to top the American bestseller list, Collier’s Magazine paid $7,500 to serialize it before its publication, and Sam Goldwyn (of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer fame) bought the movie rights for $100,000. The novel’s popularity peaked with Goldwyn and Graham casting Gregory Peck and Katharine Hepburn in the major movie production as protagonists Marc Reiser, a small-town Jewish Ontarian, and Erica Drake, a wealthy socialite Gentile (Cameron 157)—two star-crossed lovers whose romance is thwarted by religious prejudice in wartime Montreal. In spite of the novel’s convenient mise-en-scène and the script-like dialogue of Graham’s characters,1 the [End Page 121] movie version of Earth and High Heaven was never made. Production was called off in part because Laura Z. Hobson’s novel Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) beat Graham’s novel to film. Released in 1948, and starring Gregory Peck, Gentleman’s Agreement was similarly based on a romantic narrative about anti-Semitism. Elspeth Cameron notes that the release of this movie sealed Earth and High Heaven’s fate; immediately after the success of Gentleman’s Agreement, “Sam Goldwyn announced that he did not wish to make another film on the same subject” (158). Goldwyn’s decision not to proceed with the film version of Graham’s novel, however, was inspired by more than just the recent release of a similarly themed film. He was not happy with the script, which he felt focused too closely on the novel’s preaching against anti-Semitism (Cameron 157). Having little desire to make a film that condemned racial prejudice in North America, Cameron remarks that “Goldwyn was interested almost solely in the novel’s romantic plot” (157). While Goldwyn was attracted mainly to Earth and High Heaven’s unapologetic love story, surely it is this romantic plot that has led to the novel’s “forgotten” status in the Canadian canon (Cameron 146). “Earth and High Heaven was a success for all the wrong reasons,” writes Cameron: “This banal romance … attracted droves of unsophisticated readers and obscured the remarkable literary skills and complex profile of social, political, ethnic, and feminist issues that the novel displayed” (161). For Cameron, the novel’s romantic plot veils the sociopolitical message of the text and stands in stark contrast to its literary merits. John Moss might disagree with this comment, but only in its claims of literary merit. He writes, “[w]ere it not for the ‘timeliness’ of the topic, this novel would more properly belong in the company of drug-store romances” (102). Even the more recent reviews of the novel’s 2003 edition are flippant about its romantic sentimentality. Consider, for example, Fiona Foster’s 2004 review of Earth and High Heaven in which she jokingly remarks,“[i]f Oprah had been around, she would have slapped an endorsement on its cover quicker than you could say, ‘It made me cry, it made me laugh, it made me hope’” (d14). Although Foster’s review of the novel is favourable, she is also critical of Earth and High Heaven’s popular romantic element. More recent criticism of the novel, conversely, has turned a blind eye to its glaring romantic elements to focus exclusively on its important social critique. Patrick Coleman and Michael Greenstein both explore the ways [End Page 122] in which Graham’s novel challenges readers to question stable conceptions of racial and social identities.2 While both Coleman’s and Greenstein’s exceptional studies of Earth and High Heaven have repositioned it as more than just a dime novel, both studies also gloss over the importance of the novel’s genre to its socio-political message. A closer reading of Earth and High Heaven reveals that it is highly self-reflexive about its status as romantic fiction; such introspection suggests the novel’s romantic elements may play a larger part in staging its social critique...

Ralph Rader on the Literary History of the Novel

Ralph Rader on the Literary History of the Novel Frances Ferguson (bio) For generations now, literary theorists have engaged the question of exactly how specific instances of the things that we call novels relate to the abstract notion of the novel as a genre. Perhaps the single most pronounced tendency in the writing on the novel as a genre is to identify its clear emergence in the 1740s in the work of Richardson and Fielding and then to offer instances of various novel-like writings that preceded the novel. The novel thus appears to have both a form and an ur-form in which it was almost or implicitly present. On the one hand, scholars such as Margaret Doody and J. Paul Hunter have suggested, respectively, that many recognizably novel-like works were read in classical antiquity and in the years leading up to those we have traditionally associated with the novel proper. On the other, the novel appears as a precipitate of a larger socio-economic transformation. The novel, having developed in the form of a rejection or negation, is explicable less in formal terms than as the negation of certain elements available to an earlier literature. Ian Watt and Michael McKeon, despite their differences from one another, share the view that the novel is a genre partially because it tries to write fictions with little appeal to the superhuman elements of romance. For each of them the novel is directly continuous with developments in the socioeconomic worlds of the novelists: for Watt, the drive towards attitudes that combined both this-worldly practicality and intense introspection (for which he draws on Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism); for McKeon, an alertness to social and economic tensions that made the novel a staging ground for a contest between questions of truth and questions of virtue that ultimately found some resolution in claims on behalf of pleasure or aesthetic knowledge. [End Page 91] Ralph Rader’s work stands as a crucial exception to the positions I have baldly outlined above. In order to understand his position on how we might think of the novel as a genre and how we might understand its history, I would like to examine an exchange between him and McKeon that, even while it is well known, deserves to be better known than it is. My primary aim is less, however, to address the debate fully than to explicate Rader’s views. (Thus, I shall not develop the logic of McKeon’s views, which seem to me much more substantial than Rader suggests.) Rader was interested to a remarkable degree in seeing himself as engaged in a systematic project; both the brevity of his engagement with McKeon’s work and the interconnections between his views of the history of the novel and his views of literature generally are encouragements to address writing that preceded and followed his discussion with McKeon. Hence, I shall draw on a series of Rader’s essays from the 1970s and 1980s. Because Rader was committed to the view that genres are conspicuous only as actively singled out from literature in general, he saw himself as trying to capture the kinds of discriminations we make without necessarily having terms for them. Indeed, he took the most valuable distinctions to be ones that largely fell outside the list of forms that are operative in literary history. He was not himself interested in writing the history of the ode or the sonnet, nor did he recommend such a project to others, because he treated any account of genres in which one could simply take up a stable list of instances of the genre as likely to bypass elements of our literary experience. He wrote in “Literary Constructs” that “local interpretation needs to take into view the work in its comparative generic relation to other works” (338). The project of literary interpretation could not, he thought, proceed unless one were attending to the relationships that we continually build up as we compare one work with another. He took the job of criticism to involve mapping the field of literature so as to identify differences among works thought to be similar and the...

Poetic Economics: Phillis Wheatley and the Production of the Black Artist in the Early Atlantic World

This essay reads Wheatley as a key participant in the shifting economic and emotional relationships between artists, audiences, and texts that we now associate with romanticism. To recover facets of the role that the black artist played in the romantic movement(s), I examine three “portraits” of Wheatley-the poetic spectacle managed by her promoters, the actual portrait that appeared as the frontispiece for her Poems on Various Subjects, and the portrait that Wheatley herself created through her poetry. These portraits chart the tensions that circulated around the figure of the black African artist 111 the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, tensions between genius and “barbarity,” originality and imitation, exteriority and interiority, and artistic expression and commodification. These binaries have often characterized the terrain of Wheatley studies, marking opposing positions and points of contention. I argue for a different way of reading, one that sees the figure of Phillis Wheatley as produced through the interplay of all of these forces within the context of the early black Atlantic. Wheatley and her work exposed both the emphasis on “authentic” self-expression through art and the ways in which the mental life of the artist became available to the reader as a consumer product. She created a different vision of the black artist than that which commonly circulated in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, one that fused Christian discourse with romantic elements of imagination, Nature, and the poetic sublime, yet remained distant from and somewhat inaccessible to white readers.

Illusions of transcendence: Laurent Chevallier's Circus Baobab and the volatile charms of Guinean youth performance arts

Shot in a distinctively lyrical, experimental style, Laurent Chevallier's documentary Circus Baobab (2001) chronicled the pioneering tour of le premier cirque acrobatique arien d'Afrique across the Republic of Guinea. The film evinced a reverence for Guinea's cultural patrimonies, the sociological and environmental attributes of its interior regions and the spellbinding dance and acrobatic talents of the local youths who were the stars of the travelling spectacle. Despite these romantic elements, Chevallier's venture proved in significant respects a complicated reflection of colonial and postcolonial cultural politics and conflicts. This article explores some of the complex dynamics that shaped Chevallier's multifaceted project, as well as the disjunctive meanings and values ascribed to it by metropolitan and Guinean spectators. In its emphasis on the political volatility of Guinean youth performance arts over time, it hopes to expand the domains of interest and interpretive frameworks shaping cultural studies of Francophone West Africa.

Introduction: Part II

Introduction:Part II Stephen Donovan (bio), Linda Dryden (bio), and Robert Hampson (bio) In this final installment of Conradiana's volume on Conrad and serialization, the focus falls on the period 1908 to 1918, from the founding of the English Review to the serial publication of The Shadow-Line and "The Tale." This was the period of Conrad's fullest involvement with mass-market periodicals. The second installment showed how, during the middle phase of his career, Conrad adapted to the new realities of the market for print and published widely with a range of magazines, most of which were illustrated magazines intended for a general readership. Through his agent, J. B. Pinker, he became adept at placing his work on both sides of the Atlantic so that almost all his fiction was published in both American as well as British periodicals before appearing in book form in either country. In this third phase, through his engagement with serialization in mass-market periodicals, Conrad also became conscious of ways of writing for a dual readership: a general readership and a readership interested in formal and psychological complexities. This was the period when Conrad laid the basis for his popular success, and the serialization of his work played a vital part in this process. The major works of this period were Under Western Eyes, Chance, and Victory, and the essays that follow show the significance of serialization in each of these cases. Ford's recollections in Return to Yesterday provide the background to the founding of the English Review. Jessie Conrad's account of how the first issue was prepared for the press presents, with eloquent restraint, the immediate domestic impact of Conrad's close involvement with this particular serial. Ford descended on the Someries, the Conrad's home, with his assistants (Douglas Goldring and Miss Thomas) and the copy for the first issue: Lights blazed from every room downstairs […]. Orders, directions, or suggestions were shouted from room to room. It was an uproar all night, and the next day the house was in chaos. My monthly stock of provisions were soon devoured […]. (Conrad 131) [End Page 217] Conrad had a uniquely personal relationship with the first issue of the English Review, but, as Jason Harding's essay makes clear, Conrad continued to have a substantial involvement with the journal after Ford gave up the editorship (and after his friendship with Ford had ended). Ford persuaded Conrad to write his reminiscences for the En-glish Review, and Harding convincingly demonstrates how Conrad's confrontation with Polish ghosts and negotiation of his fractured identity through these essays provide a significant context for Under Western Eyes, on the one hand, and "Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic" and The Shadow-Line, on the other. Under Western Eyes offers an ideological challenge to the Russian authors whose work in translation was serialized alongside it in the English Review, while the Englishness of the Review provided a suitable haven from which Conrad could revisit his "adoption" by the British Merchant Navy. With the English Review, Ford was trying to "start a Movement," and his models were the great Victorian reviews of general culture or contemporary French reviews (Goldring 25). He was out of step with—or, rather, consciously opposed to—developments in British and American publishing. Conrad's relations with the English Review are quite different from his relations to the other serials in which his work appeared in this period, and the English Review is quite a different kind of periodical. Most important, all of Conrad's subsequent novels first appeared in serial form in mass-market publications. Victory, for example, appeared in Munsey's Magazine in the United States and in the large-circulation London evening paper, the Star. In his account of Victory's serialization history, Roger Osborne shows how the novel addresses a dual readership and how it could be made to fit the codes of magazine fiction, while carrying the cultural cachet of serious literature. This involved the publishers in foregrounding the role of Lena and emphasizing the plot elements of romance, adventure, and love. At the same time, as Osborne argues, the truncated text of Victory that...

Charting the Pluriverse

Page 12 American Book Review Charting the Pluriverse Joseph D. Haske This ambitious collection highlights over fiftyfive years of obras maestras from “Nicaragua’s preeminent poet after Rubén Darío,” and one of Latin America’s most well-known and accomplished poets throughout America and Europe; Ernesto Cardenal has been published in over twenty languages, and his life’s work has certainly warranted his place of distinction in LatinAmerican letters. Aworthy tribute to this living legend, Pluriverse boasts the English translations of some of Cardenal’s best verse in four unique sections, arranged in chronological order. The collection begins with Zero Hour, poetry from 1949–59. The initial works of this section evoke the turbulent events of Nicaragua’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and often refer to historical figures like William Walker in poems like “With Walker in Nicaraugua.” In these poems, Cardenal employs vivid imagery to convey messages of an often overtly political nature. Editor Jonathan Cohen states that this time period reflects a crucial turning point in Cardenal’s poetic style, as the poet, during his time at Columbia University in New York, “immersed himself in the work of US poets.” Cardenal’s burgeoning concern for the sociopolitical situation in his home country coupled with the influence ofAmerican poets, particularly modernists such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, allow the poet to convey local concerns, past and present, in a uniquely universal manner, while remaining grounded in the roots of the subject matter and its personal impact. “With Walker in Nicaragua” displays the subtle influence of early-twentieth-century American imagist poetry embedded in wistful Whitmanesque diatribes: What scenes return to my memory now! A grey wave that comes blotting out the hills and a muffled sound of flood waters rushing through the jungle and the howls of monkeys on the opposite bank and the heavy, metallic beating of raindrops on the tin roofs and the people running to take in the clothes from the ranch porches and later the grey wave and the muffled sound moving off and once again the silence…. The best such work in this section sustains an intense emotional reaction to the deadly serious subject matter through such lucid nature imagery and concise diction. Near the end of the section, Cardenal’s “Epigrams ” marks an abrupt stylistic and thematic shift from the previous poems. Cardenal employs raw, passionate language and stark, candid description that skillfully evokes simultaneous pain and pleasure, as the speaker explores the complexity of human relationships and boasts the power of the pen: I give you these verses, Claudia, because they belong to you. I’ve written them plainly so you can understand them. They’re just for you, but if they bore you, maybe one day they’ll spread, all through Spanish America… and if you also scorn the love that wrote them, other women will dream of this love that is not meant for them. And, perhaps you’ll see, Claudia, that these poems (written to court you) inspire in other living couples who read them the kisses that the poet did not inspire in you. The brief, almost lyrical verses of “Epigrams” demonstrate some of the typically subtle distinctions between Cardenal and American contemporaries with similar influences, such as his classmate at Columbia University,Allen Ginsberg; while the modernist movement in the US and Britain essentially mandated the absence of romantic elements in verse, especially for the willing acolytes of Pound, aspects of the romantic have often lingered on in Latin American poetry. Even among self-proclaimed modernistas, the seemingly contradictory amalgamation of hope and despair has surfaced with some frequency both stylistically and through thematic concerns. All that is known to humanity is in a state of decline, the world fragmented, yet somehow, a sense of hope lingers on; this sense of optimism is often manifested in LatinAmerican verse through elements of the spiritual, a connection to a higher power that transcends all human concerns and can be revealed through the works of poets such as Cardenal. In this regard, Cardenal skillfully incorporates the best of the likes of Pound and Williams into his work while upholding a certain “tradition” of...

Have sex will travel: romantic ‘sex tourism’ and women negotiating modernity in the Sinai

Since the 1970s, studies on western women's ethnosexual tourist–local relationships have tended to focus on the beaches of the Caribbean and have come to one of two main conclusions – either they are no different from the overtly exploitative relationships of heterosexual male sex tourists or they are different because they involve a softer, caring element of romance. This article proposes that both positions have led to constrictive, circular research that highlights the racialised and economically disparate nature of these exchanges but mostly ignores the importance of imaginative and emotional geographies caught up in such relationships. Based on fieldwork interviews with men and women in the resorts of the South Sinai, Egypt, I argue that these encounters can be seen as examples of a modern subjectivity that are defined by and take place within imagined (fixed) constructions of landscapes, native third world masculinity (in this case Arab/Bedouin), femininity (white, heterosexual, western), freedom and love (spiritual and physical): all presented in some form of opposition to a particularist idea of modernity and viewed through a filter of selective (and spatially circumscribed) histories. By adding a geographical dimension, this article aims to open up the current debate on female sex tourism to a wider range of issues and reveal more of the conflicts, tensions and imaginations that make up these encounters.

Transforming Classicism into Romanticism and Beyond in Goethe’s “The Roman Carnival”

This essay situates “The Roman Carnival,” a short narrative in Goethe’s fictional travelogue, Italian Journey, within the debate about Goethe’s relationship to classicism. I argue that this narrative evokes the structure of a Greek tragedy, but reverses retardation and catastrophe, thus creating an anti-climactic effect at the end. Therefore, this text simultaneously affirms as well as undermines its classical model. Introducing an elusive narrator, stock characters and scenes from the commedia dell’arte, Goethe continues to break classical rules and adds an undercurrent of Romantic irony to the process of signification. This unconventional textual weave of discursively juxtaposed traditions, namely narrative with drama, classical tragedy with popular comedy, and classical with Romantic elements, transforms set categories into a progressive meta-text. This meta-text transcends established formal and philosophical/theoretical paradigms by eliminating their hierarchical and historical order within the new open and multi-directional organization of the narrative.

Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction Dorothy Kelly Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction. Andrea Goulet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. viii + 272. $49.95 (cloth). The image of a murderer imprinted on a dead woman's retina, the delayed visual experience of an afterimage—these and other examples of nineteenth-century optics ground Andrea Goulet's investigation of the science of the eye and modern French fiction. Her method brings to mind Foucault's genealogy of the gaze in her investigation of changes in the nineteenth-century understanding of vision in science, philosophy, and literature. She first identifies crucial opposing terms that structure the century's philosophic and scientific debates on perception. She then locates these oppositions at the heart of the modern French novel, whose form is tied to visual perspective and whose narrative subject is defined according to visual paradigms. Her premise is that an understanding of nineteenth-century optical science and philosophy can help us to understand the visual logic of narrative and the way the nineteenth-century "envisions" the acquisition of knowledge through sight. Her clever title, Optiques, aptly embodies the two major oppositions in the debate. The French word on the one hand refers to the "objective" science of the eye and of vision. On the other hand, the word optique can mean a "subjective" point of view or a perspective in both the literal and figural senses. The word's dual meaning thus expresses the opposing conceptions of vision that vie for primacy in philosophy/science and in narrative. Is vision a purely mechanical and physical reception of light from without? Or does sight exist in the mind, in subjective perception? The exact nature of the opposition varies from text to text: inductive or deductive logic, objective or subjective perspective, idealist or empiricist philosophy. A great strength of her readings is that she does not distort the texts to fit one single, over-arching dichotomy but rather reveals the problematic specific to each text from the particular optical topics found there. Her mapping of the vagaries of these dichotomies is important and interesting because it reveals the changes (again one thinks of Foucault) in the understanding of vision that lead to such schools of thought as phenomenology in the twentieth century. [End Page 834] Her introduction provides a coherent and useful background to the scientific and philosophical issues that she examines in detail in the literary texts. Then each of the book's three parts centers on the way in which the literary texts negotiate contradictory understandings of perception. In order to situate the science firmly in the texts, she has chosen narratives that use specific optical topics such as optograms in their narratives. Her claim is that the appearance of these topics in the literary texts is not gratuitous but rather central to nineteenth-century narrative concerns and practices, and to these texts specifically. The first section on Balzac exposes the conflict between the ideality of visionary insight and the empiricism of realist vision. Séraphîta and Victor Morillon, whose immediate and intuitive "second sight" does not need the empirical world, contrast with Henri de Marsay and his immersion in the temporality of interpreting what his eye perceives. For de Marsay, understanding results from taking a second look, a different kind of "second sight." Centering her analyses on the specific optical topics of the camera obscura and afterimages, Goulet shows how Balzac's texts engage in a kind of struggle between the two positions, between Romantic elements of the fantastic in the visionary experience of seers and nascent realism in empirically minded protagonists. In the second section on the early French detective novel, a genre which evolves in part from Balzac's narratives, Goulet reads against the typical view of detective fiction as a manifestation of pure Cartesian rationality exemplified by Sherlock Holmes. Using the science and philosophy of Cuvier and Helmholtz, she identifies both deductive and empirical tendencies of criminal investigations in texts by Poe, Doyle, Gaboriau, and Leroux. The optical topics of interest in these chapters include "floaters" and blind spots...

Terror, Love, and the National Voyeur: Gilbert Parker’s The Seats of the Mighty

One of most popular Canadian novels of late nineteenth century is one that many non-specialists today may not have even heard of, Gilbert Parker's The Seats of Mighty (1896). The novel, which is set like many Canadian novels of time during fall of Quebec, received instant international acclaim (Ripley 9) and was first of Parker's novels to be published in a Canadian edition, which eventually became a standard highschool text (Adams 85). A theatrical version of novel was staged in 1897, attended by U.S. President Grover Cleveland at Boston performance and put on in London, England, for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee (Ripley 9). There are some good reasons why this particular novel was so well known among English speakers at turn of century and so significant for anglophone Canadians especially, although these reasons have yet to be fully explored. The few critics who have recently looked at novel notice its racism in way it pits British-Canadian morality against French decadence. (1) However, what I am particularly interested in here is that this decadence is not merely condemned and dismissed but reformulated in such a way that it can be controlled by anglophone Canadians. Francophones in novel are both celebrated and disavowed through a complex process that involves an anxious surveillance to distinguish and categorize cultures that, on surface of skin, appear similar. Parker's manipulation of genre of historical romance is key in relation to this project. In A Purer Taste, Carole Gerson describes popularity of this genre in nineteenth-century Canada, indicating how early English Canadians were looking for same nationalistic affect in their own fiction that Sir Walter Scott had achieved in his for Great Britain (68). As Gerson points out, English Canadians often drew upon colourful history of French Canada in historical romances in order to establish cultural distinctiveness from Great Britain on one hand and United States on (111). Especially around turn of century, many English Canadians wanted this cultural distinctiveness, while still wishing for strong ties to Britain. Parker, born in Canada, was an imperialist who spent part of his life residing in Britain and eventually became a Member of Parliament there. Thus, his portrayals of Canada often seem to characterize it as interesting and distinct, but in ways that wouldn't alienate British readers. The task of glamorizing French Canada, without de-valourizing Britain, is one of key processes in early Canadian historical romances generally and Parker's work specifically. In The Seats of Mighty, voyeurism of protagonist juxtaposes two common elements of historical romance, gothicism and love story, in order to work out this process. (2) The novel centres on relationship between Robert Moray, a British soldier in captivity in Quebec, and Alixe Duvarney, a young Canadienne. Throughout novel, lovers' happiness is threatened by war, Catholic Church, and Tinoir Doltaire, a charming French villain who wants Alixe for himself. As several critics have noticed, The Seats of Mighty plays out through its love story conflicts between nations (what Carl Murphy calls the marriage metaphor of early Canadian fiction), with Alixe standing in for French Canada, Robert for British, and Doltaire for French; (3) that is, Alixe's choice of Robert represents Quebec's allegiance to Britain over France. However, critics have failed to adequately examine appeal, for both Robert and readers, and in such a pro-anglophone novel, of villainous Doltaire, nor have they really explained why heroine, far from being a damsel in distress, is a far more active character than Robert himself, or why Parker appears so obsessed with voyeuristic moments. Such elements, as I will demonstrate, are related to another understudied aspect of novel--the ways it contributes to and draws upon colonial discourses and processes present in other parts of British Empire in Parker's day. …

From Critical Theory of Technology to the Rational Critique of Rationality

This paper explores the sense in which modern societies can be said to be rational. Social rationality cannot be understood on the model of an idealized image of scientific method. Neither science nor society conforms to this image. Nevertheless, critique is routinely silenced by neo‐liberal and technocratic arguments that appeal to social simulacra of science. This paper develops a critical strategy for addressing the resistance of rationality to rational critique. Romantic rejection of reason has proven less effective than strategies that conceptualize modern artefacts, systems, and organizations as rationally underdetermined. This approach first appears in Marx’s analysis of capitalist economics. Although he lacks the concept of underdetermination, Marx gets around the silencing effect of social rationality with something very much like it in his discussion of the length of the working day. Frankfurt School Critical Theory later blended romantic elements with Marxian ones in a suggestive but ambiguous mixture. The concept of underdetermination reappears in contemporary science and technology studies, now clearly articulated and philosophically and sociologically elaborated. But somewhere along the way the critical thrust was diluted. Critical theory of technology attempts to recover that thrust. Here its approach is generalized to cover the three main forms of social rationality.

Shelley and the Romantic imagination: a psychological study

Shelley was the most extreme and controversial of the English Romantics, and this book studies the most romantic element in his vision and in Romanticism in general: the attempt to bring to life imaginings of ideal eros and of a human paradise. Using concepts from Freud and such later psychoanalytic writers as Geza Roheim, Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Heinz Kohut, and Margaret Mahler, Shelley and the Romantic Imagination analyzes an interplay in Shelley between a regressive impulse to return to union with the mother and an aggressive, progressive impulse toward a separate, autonomous ego.

Edipo, Tragedia de Martínez de la Rosa

Before writing his tragedyEdipo, which was published in Paris in 1829 and performed for the first time by Grimaldi’s company in Seville in 1830, Martinez de la Rosa pursued the Oedipus theme in European literature. Among the main adaptations of SophoclesOidipous turannos there were the versions by Seneca, Dryden, Corneille, Voltaire, and La Motte. Neoclassical criticism had censured three faults in Sophocles’ play: some events are lacking in verisimilitude; Creon is dispensable because of his scanty contribution to the story; and the fifth act becomes meaningless after Oedipus’ identity has being revealed. Martinez de la Rosa’s assessments of both classical and modern versions of the Oedipus myth, as well as the opinions of the eighteenth-century critcs, give us clues for understanding the ways in which he conceived his own version. TheEdipo, which amalgamates neoclassical with romantic elements, addresses the most distinct themes of Spanish romantic drama: unwitting killing of a relative, incest, suicide, fatalistic love that leads to insanity or death, recognition of self-identity, tragic fate of hero, rupture of familial unity, term announced by divinity for punishing the guilty, bloody incidents, sepulchers and ghosts. Furthermore, the hypothesis is defended here that, by means ofEdipo, Martinez de la Rosa tried subtly to persuade King Fernando VII (1808 and 1814–1833) to renounce absolutism.

The Click

The Click Ronald Frame (bio) Just a click of the fingers. She was incensed. Back in her room Lydia Ellison opened the wardrobe and fetched out the gin. The sound of the finger-click was still ringing in her ears. She poured a good triple measure into the tumbler and added tonic, which was getting flat, stirred with her index finger, and licked the finger as a taster. She, who had been so fastidious about manners when they were living out in the Indian tea hills. Tough shit! That's what she'd heard one of the gardening girls saying to another, and then they'd turned and looked at her furtively, with cowed You-won't-tell-on-us-will-you? looks on their stupid faces. Well, no, not now. Not after what had just happened in the downstairs corridor, within a shout of the residents' lounge. She gulped down the drink. More gin than tonic, just how it should be. This stuff had seen her through many an afternoon. She was promiscuous: Gordon's, Beefeater, Canadian, whatever she could get cheapest in the Carnbeg off-license shops. It was her only indulgence nowadays. Not clothes, God knows, or magazines, or any of the other things she used to spend Nigel's money on. That had been her revenge. It was her getting back for those evenings when Nigel came home late from his "ministrations," as he called them. The click of the latch gate, and the prodigal returned, still wearing his clerical dog collar in the heat. * * * It had started out like any of those marriages he performed, with high hopes. Lydia was young, and pretty enough, and her being Scottish and the wife of a Church of England chaplain in India was always a conversation opener. Her fame as a country dancer went before, to wherever Nigel was posted next. Across that vast land she was known as a dancer of reels and strathspeys par excellence. So long as they could skip-step, she would tell people, they would be fine. On would go another gramophone record of [End Page 62] a fiddle-and-accordion band, and they were all off again, round the pinewood floor. Even Beethoven, she'd remind them, used the scotch snaps. It's as real to her now, that experience, as the routines of the Sun Dial Eventide Home where she is living. She spends half her time in India still. The news on tv doesn't reach her, but in her mind she can recite the names of the socialites and country clubs she read about in the high-society magazines published in Delhi or Bombay or Calcutta. Meanwhile Nigel used to disappear behind his copy of the Times of India every morning, shamefaced. No bloody wonder. * * * She first met Nigel here in Carnbeg. He had been sent to cover for the Reverend Knott, at the little half-timbered Piscy church by the railway bridge. Her own mother had recently remarried, and Lydia Ellison was desperate to get away from the town. Nigel's parents invited her to holidays in Eastbourne and Norfolk, and seemed to think she was just the ticket for Nigel. Just what the doctor might have ordered. When she married Nigel, the Ellisons bought them a house. But after two years Nigel suddenly decided he was called somewhere else—to India. There was a romantic element in both their natures—or was it, more simply, snobbishness?—and she was happy to go along with the plan. * * * In India they lived well, even better than on the Ellisons' charity in England. A chaplain didn't fit very straightforwardly into the pecking order, which was their saving. She didn't even like the taste of gin until she was forty-five. A few drinks helped to pass the evening. For twenty-odd years she had ignored the fact she didn't believe what Nigel preached from the pulpit: if he had faith, that was enough. It was only when the ministrations began in earnest that God sought her out. She went to the church one evening in Seebopore to try—try—to pray for some enlightenment and heard Nigel...

Nozawa dorama: televisual authorship in the currents of suspense and desire

This article offers an interpretation of the contribution of the recently deceased scriptwriter Nozawa Hisashi (1960–2004) to Japanese television production. Focusing on the recursive genre mixing in Nozawa's television serials from 1992 to 2002, this article develops the notion of ‘televisual authorship’ to better situate individual creators of television programs in wider cultural and social contexts. Mystery thrillers and marriage stories became the major generic currents in Nozawa's television serial dramas in a production context saturated with trendy love stories and also in a larger televisual atmosphere that questioned stabilizing forces in society, like the family. Committed to novelistic storytelling and socially grounded characterization, Nozawa transformed the traditional elements of crime and romance to underline love's pragmatic role in the pursuit of social justice. Unfortunately, this ‘social message’ may ultimately be lost in the information mode of Japanese televisual culture.