Satirical Purposes Research Articles

READING OBSCENE TEXTS AND THEIR HISTORIES

Histories of pornography and obscenity attained academic respectability relatively recently. They attempt to show when the cultural categories of pornography and obscenity came into being, and most agree that they are coextensive with modernity (defined in various ways, but mainly as coincident with the rise of print between the late sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries). Historians see a distinction between sexual representation in early modern Europe, which was used primarily for satirical purposes, and modern pornography, in which sex is isolated from its social and cultural context and presented as a thing in itself. However, we should be critical of this stark distinction, as the modern legal–cultural category of the obscene is much wider than that of the pornographic, and contains many of the diverse elements of earlier cultures of erotic writing, bawdiness and pseudo-intellectualism. Modern historians could profit by using the techniques of early modern literary history, and by studying print forms.

Cipher against Ciphers: Jonathan Swift's Latino-Anglicus Satire of Medicine

Best remembered for Gulliver's Travels and “A Modest Proposal,” the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift also delighted in word puzzles, elaborate rhyming exercises, constrained writing, and cryptographs. Among his favorite word games was his “Latino-Anglicus,” an ingenious cipher in which an English plaintext is encrypted in a “Latin” ciphertext. Although the “Latino-Anglicus” has long been dismissed as “trifling,” Swift could, in fact, put the amusing form to serious satiric purpose, as in “A Consultation of Four Physicians upon a Lord That Was Dying,” which caricatures pretentious and venal academic doctors of his day.

The Language of Satire: An Exploration of Stylistic Devices in Tanure Ojaide’s "The Fate of Vultures and Other Poems"

This paper examines the artistic use of language for satiric purposes in Tanure Ojaide are The Fate of Vultures. In many of the works of contemporary African poets, the language of satire creates both humour and a shock of recognition through the linguistic foregrounding of situations, character and events in the content and from. Satiric language therefore becomes a tool for exposing human frailty, institutional (or social) vices and corruption. It is our aim therefore, to explore the stylistic devices in the text, thereby highlighting the satirical effect he achieves in the collection and the meanings derivable.

“You Are Here”: Missing Links, Chains of Being, and the Language of Cartoons

Evolution cartoons served polemical and satirical purposes even before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and they proliferated afterward. Yet even though Victorian evolution cartoons often pictured Darwin himself as a personification of his theory, by the time of the Scopes trial controversy in the 1920s cartoons about evolution had come to popularize ironically non-Darwinian views of evolution. Cartoons repeated, reflected, and perpetuated teleological views of evolution and often implicitly associated evolution with prevalent attitudes about race, gender, and social hierarchies. Cartoons drew on old iconographic traditions, expanding them to fit changing historical circumstances, forming a lasting cartoon lexicon. Though adaptable and protean, the language of evolution cartoons, like any language, carries its history with it, and in them we can read the history of the cultural context of evolution controversies.

Når værk bliver til vold

When Work is Violence:Drawing on examples as divergent as current Muslim responses to the Danish cartoons and German terrorism in the 70s, this article aims to show how a closed alliance between art, politics and religion carries the risk of inducing violence which, among other things, annuls the function of art as being inherently ambiguous.It is argued that the function of art in Islam is bound up with the inviolable authority of the prophet and is therefore basically unable to fulfil satiric purposes. Although satire and laughter were also confined to unofficial activities under the Roman Church in medieval times, it is claimed, along the lines of Bakhtin, that a ‘culture of laughter’ actually did survive in the European history of art and paved the way for the appreciation of the potential of satirical critique. Following Benjamin, it is further claimed that the post-auratic function of art joined up with the revolutionary hope for a new aesthetics of life contrary to the fragmentary world of urban capitalism. Finally, as its major case, the article discusses the sliding of aesthetic provocation into political activism in 70s Germany resulting in Urban terrorism. In this case, the function of art once again falls back into a totalitarian critique which merely acknowledges a singular picture of the world. In conclusion, it is pointed out that aesthetic expressions are only imbued with an anti-violent vitality due to a non-condemning, ambiguous openness.

Auction Catalogues and Political Satire. The Low Countries under the Hammer

Abstract The history of imaginary libraries can be traced back to François Rabelais. Most of such libraries were created for satirical purposes rather than bibliographical amusement. Somewhere during the seventeenth century, auction catalogues also became a vehicle of political satire. One of the most successful literary hoaxes involved an imaginary library and its auction catalogue. The announcement of an auction in the small provincial town of Binche in the Belgian province of Hainault on August 10, 1840 fooled librarians and collectors alike, for neither the collector nor his collection existed. The auction never took place. Was it just a hoax, or did the event reflect some painful truths about the 1830 separation of the Low Countries into two powerless mini states?

It's a Political Jungle Out There

/ This article analyses cartoon images of African political leaders published in three African satirical newspapers: Le Cafard libéré (The Liberated Cockroach) of Senegal, Le Messager Popoli (Popoli Messenger) of Cameroon and Le Marabout (The Marabou) of Burkina Faso, and one `traditional newspaper', The Daily Nation of Nairobi, Kenya, during the post-Cold War period (1995—2004). The cartoons used transilience, the African narrative device whereby human beings are given animal attributes for purposes of satire, and `deterritorialization', whereby they are symbolically taken out of their natural `territories' in order to denounce the excesses of authoritarianism. Transilience and deterritorialization are counter-discourses that present the idea that authoritarianism is animalistic and self-destructive.

BREASTS ARE BACK! COLETTE'S CRITIQUE OF FLAPPER FASHION

This paper focuses on Colette's writing for the periodical press, particularly her writing on fashion, and sets out to discuss it in terms of its capacity to effect the high purposes of satire. Its method of reading is contextualizing, rather than immanent - it brings it into relation with a number of issues on which it bears: the history of fashion, the history of the body, generational change, the visual determinants of the fashions of the early twentieth century. Although humour is prominent, Colette is not content merely to make jokes. Ancient satire, which derives from the rhetoric of praise and blame, is the source of literary and art criticism, and Colette borrows both its modes and its vocation to elevate fashion writing to the level of cultural critique. Moralistic, it teaches something about social mores by making fun of them. Hence, Colette makes us laugh at the fact that fashion affects not only clothes, but bodies; style fashions the body and hence the self.

Epigrams and Political Satire in Early Stuart England

The Renaissance epigram was distinguished from satire by its brevity and sharpness, features that influenced how the form was used for political commentary. Its classical legacy promised an elite status and authorial control, but its brevity and wit encouraged widespread oral, manuscript, and print circulation, and epigrammatists therefore struggled to distinguish their work from various popular forms, such as the ballad. The sub-genre of the epitaph was often used for satiric purposes, and examples prompted by the death of the epigrammatist John Owen provide a case study in the dynamics of poetic and political exchange. epigrams and political satire 45 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.183 on Thu, 21 Apr 2016 06:19:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Medical merriment in the works of Enrique Jardiel Poncela

AbstractEnrique Jardiel Poncela, a twentieth-century Spanish comic writer principally of novels and plays, developed a personal approach to creating humor that involved a novel vision of humor’s literary potential (for his time). Beginning in 1926, he undertook the renovation of humor in creative writing in Spain based on his new objectives. In his peculiar jardielist style in which art for art’s sake is his predominant motive, he pursued a distinctive mode of writing characterized by inverosimilitude, incongruity, wild inventiveness and hyperbole. As one of his comic resources, he made abundant use of doctors, medicines, therapies, diseases, medical terminology and ignorance of medicine by the public in general for his literary purposes. To date, study of this important aspect of his work has been largely neglected. This study proposes to fill that lacuna by examining his use of deformation of language, character and situation and the comic techniques he utilized for purposes of satire and parody in his novels and plays.

Shakespeare, Soccer, and Spin-doctors: Staging a Contemporary Henry V; Henry V at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales, UK, November 2002

Taken as a whole, the history plays are the most neglected of Shakespeare's dramatic works, not least because their animation of "real" history is perceived as potentially alienating for a contemporary audience. In Henry V, however, we find a play that is a thrilling theatrical journey and the use of the play in production from the Elizabethan period to our own time presents fascinating examples of the use of Shakespeare for purposes of propaganda or satire. The University of Glamorgan Henry V attempted to be a production for the twenty-first century, and used Shakespeare's text to explore contemporary ideological issues and political anxieties. The production design utilized the iconography of sport and familiar images from the news media to develop and explore the regional, national, and global concerns that the script of Shakespeare, himself the greatest adapter in the history of English theater, seems able to facilitate.

The Cyclops of Philoxenus

Philoxenus of Cythera's dithyramb,CyclopsorGalatea, was a poem famous in antiquity as the source for the story of Polyphemus' love for the sea-nymph Galatea. The exact date of composition is uncertain, but the poem must pre-date 388 B.C., when it was parodied by Aristophanes in the parodos ofPlutus(290–01), and probably, as we shall see below, post-dates 406, the point at which Dionysius I became tyrant of Syracuse (D.S. 13.95–6). The Aristophanic parody of the work may well point to a recent performance in Athens, perhaps the first, and it is hard to identify any more significant reason for mentioning the poem. Previous accounts of the poem have concentrated on two main points, its supposed satirical purpose, and the possibly dramatic nature of its performance, but there has been no attempt to consider these two points in relation to each other, or to assess in detail the value of the source-material. I argue that although there is some evidence to support the satirical reading of the poem, the main value of this tradition is that it reveals Philoxenus' comic treatment of his subject, and that while the Galatea motif has previously been considered the essential element in this comic treatment, it was probably a small part of the plot, perhaps only briefly alluded to. Finally I provide reasons for doubting the prevalent view that the performance included dramatic elements.

Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930- 1980 (review)

Reviewed by: Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980 David W. Madden Steven Weisenburger. Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. 320 pp. In Fables of Subversion Steven Weisenburger challenges a host of traditional notions about satire and postmodern American fiction. In spite of its seemingly limited scope—American novels between 1930 and 1980—Weisenburger offers a serious and probing refutation of New Critical assumptions that have dominated scholarly and popular discourse on the subject. [End Page 848] The study’s introduction carefully lays the conceptual and theoretical foundation for the five remaining chapters. Weisenburger draws a crucial distinction between generative and “degenerative” satirical writing, with the generative mode representing traditional satires. The degenerative mode he describes as “delegitimizing . . . function[ing] to subvert hierarchies of value and to reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own. Still more, it suspects that any symbolic practice may entail incursions of power whose logic tends toward either total domination or the final chaos of reciprocal violence.” This degenerative mode is largely a postmodern phenomenon. Drawing primarily on Jean-François Lyotard, Weisenburger emphasizes the postmodern doubt about the modernists’ attempts to use literature as a way of establishing a canon of high art and enlightenment. Instead, postmodern art emphasizes contingency and pluralist approaches, which, “[d]espite all their apparent negativity and nihilism, . . . the subversive carnivals of postmodernism bear witness to the opening of a ‘pagan’ discourse that was always at the heart of modern darkness.” Postmodern satirists “suspect all structures, including structures of perceiving, representing, and transforming,” and their works interrogate the violence and terror inherent in established cultural forms of discourse. Consistent features of the contemporary satire are its deformations of plot, grotesque violence, transtextuality, and excessive attention to details. Weisenburger clearly demonstrates the ways in which Formalist criticism has dominated the scholarship on satire, defining conventions which simply have nothing to do with degenerative, postmodern fictions. Weisenburger refutes the validity of four crucial assumptions underlying traditional criticism—satire is a rhetorical formulation offering a rational argument and appealing to the common opinions of a majority of readers; it requires an extramural object of attack rather than the act of fiction-making itself; satire is a moral or ethical corrective; and it is normative. In each case he demonstrates that the methods and purposes of degenerative satire have nothing in common with conventions drawn from far more conventional satiric models. Finally, the introduction considers research on the grotesque and carnivalesque to clarify the sensibility of degenerative satire. “Carnival definitively illustrates the semiotic processes of dismantling and exposure of [End Page 849] which satire is a part. Amid its disorder, one discovers points of view, specific orderings that are suppressed by or in sharp opposition to authorized representations.” The lineage of writers considered begins with Nathanael West whose works tend increasingly toward the fully accomplished degenerative mode defined in the first chapter. The Day of the Locust is the apogee of West’s satiric practices and a work that “can be read as a narrative about the troubled emergence of a radical, degenerative mode of satire.” Analyses of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and John Hawkes’s The Cannibal emphasize the contemporary development of this sensibility. A chapter devoted to Black Humor presents the most careful and well-argued reevaluation of that literary phenomenon to date. While regarding Black Humor as “the early, literary expression of an emerging postmodernism,” Weisenburger cuts through the hyperbole of many longstanding assumptions to demonstrate that the impulse to joke dominates the fictions of Kurt Vonnegut, J. P. Donleavy, and Terry Southern. James Purdy’s Cabot Wright Begins, a book for some time overlooked by critics and scholars, is seen as an inspired failure, while Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Hawkes’s Travesty are submitted as the most daring and fully realized examples of Black Humor satire. A fourth chapter addresses examples of social and political satire in the 1960s, wherein Weisenburger argues that postmodern American satires have less to do with corrective solutions than the exposition of dissent...

Homeric Laughter by the Waters of Babylon

Which contemporary of Karl Marx (1818-83) left the clearest and deepest traces in his work? None other than Heinrich Heine (17971856). Heine is omnipresent in Marx's work, from his first poetic attempts as an 18-year-old Abiturient to the drafts for Kapital that he left behind at the time of his death. His manuscripts, publications, and letters swarm with direct and indirect quotations, paraphrases, and allusions to Heine. Moreover, wherever Marx refers to Heine, explicitly or implicitly, he does so with approval and sympathy. Only to Heine did Marx grant such privileges; all other contemporaries of Marx enjoyed his favor only briefly. Marx's consistently positive reception of Heine is not at all confined to verbatim borrowings; it is expressed stylistically as well, in favored syntactical constructions, rhetorical flourishes, and intentional lapses of style. Marx also continually exploits predominantly the same mythological and literary resources as Heine, for purposes of parody, polemic, satire, or pathos: Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Prometheus, Shylock, Don Quixote, Faust. Marx uses the tradition in the fashion ot such classical writers as Lucian or such moderns as Sterne, both favorites of Heine, but he uses it most forcefully in a strategy of Veirfemdung developed by Heine. In both authors' arsenal of motifs, characters, and figures of speech, one book dominates: namely, the Book of Books, the Bible the Old Testament, as Christians call it, as well as the New Testament. It goes without saying that references are to Luther's translation of the Bible. The Bible is ultimately at the heart of the immense affinity between Marx and Heine, an affinity formed in the territory between German Judaism and German Protestantism. Jews whose mother tongue was German

Satire, Speech, and Genre

T HE PROTEAN QUALITY of satire is generally recognized (e.g., Worcester 3-10). Homer's account of the capture of Proteus (Odyssey 4) suggests that to perceive the of satire we must begin with its disguises or formal appearances. A number of critics have noted the tendency of satire to parody or imitate other genres or literary models. Frederic Stopp finds that traditionally satire has always borrowed its ground-plan, parasitically and by ironic inversion, from other of ordered expression in art or in life (201). James W. Nichols distinguishes between parody (an imitation and alteration or distortion of the style or structure of an original for the purpose of criticizing it) and what he calls pattern (any adaptation of an original for satiric purposes when the chief purpose is not parody, 54). Nichols goes on to distinguish between patterns that imitate specific literary those that imitate originals found in number of literary works, and those that are not literary at all (59). The basic process Nichols identifies as pattern is described by Leon Guilhamet as transformation. For Guilhamet, satire is essentially a borrower of forms (13), which it de-forms and transforms into a new generic identity by disruptive, fictive techniques (11-12). The satiric practice of imitating, parodying, and borrowing other is undertaken, as definers of satire agree, in the interests of attacking not only evil but the actual, historical individuals who perpetrate it. Satire becomes problematic as genre because of the tensions between the self-consciously formal character of its medium and particular reality of its attack. If satire were merely self-referential and ahistorical, readers might well wonder why one should bother; if it were merely historical rather than formal, its issues could be resolved by libel courts rather than literary critics. The formal nature of

Johnson's Use of Sources in the Life of Sir Francis Drake

Johnson's Use of Sources in the Life ofSir Francis Drake O M Brack, Jr. Arizona State University Having the satisfaction to find that the account of Admiral Blake in our last Magazine was not disagreeable to the public," Johnson announced in the Gentleman's Magazine for July 1740, "we propose in our next to entertain our readers with the life and actions of Sir Francis Drake, including many of the most memorable transactions of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in which our long continued wars with the Spaniards laid the foundation of that settled animosity which yet continues between the two nations." The Life of Sir Francis Drake (1740-41) was intended to serve the same purpose as the Life of Blake—to contrast the feeble efforts of Sir Robert Walpole's administration, in pursuing the War of Jenkins' Ear, with Britain's past naval glories—though it is worth noting that Johnson, in the announcement, points out that "it is not only to his military virtues that his country owes reverence and gratitude. His fortitude in surmounting difficulties and encountering dangers of a different kind, his spirit in forming great designs, and his resolution in prosecuting them deserve to be proposed to the imitation of every age; and we are more indebted to the discoverer than the soldier, as the nation owes less of its wealth and power to its arms than to its navigation" (10:352). That Johnson for political purposes should turn to the Elizabethan period, and to Drake in particular, as a standard against which his own age could be judged and found wanting initially seems surprising. But as early as London (1738) Johnson has the poet and Thaïes "kneel and kiss the consecrated earth; /In pleasing dreams the blissful age renew, / And call Britannia's glories back to view" (24-26), at the sight of Greenwich, birthplace of Elizabeth. Here, at least for the purposes of satire, Johnson shares the romanticized view of history held by many of his contemporaries who looked to the past, and particularly to the reign of Elizabeth, as a time of great national pride and achievement. In his 1760 review of William Tytler's Historical and Critical Enquiry into the casket letters of Mary Queen of Scots, he remarks, "It has now been fashionable, for near half a century ... to exalt and magnify the reign of Elizabeth" and in Thoughts on Falkland's Islands (1771) he calls "the reign of Elizabeth, the favorite period of English greatness" (1825 Works 6: 81; Works 10: 374). But given Johnson's skepticism, understanding of historical evidence, and zeal for truth, can there be any justification for such an exalted view of the past? 197 198Rocky Mountain Review Certainly Johnson did not think that the past was superior to the present. "We are strong as they, and a great deal wiser," he told Lord Monboddo (Boswell 5:77). Johnson could argue in Adventurer No. 95 (October 2, 1753), however, that the moralist may "deliver his sentiments" by using "historical examples" (2: 426). Liberties with historical truth, Johnson frequently reminds us, are unacceptable in accounts that purport to be objective, yet some allowance is to be made for certain moral, political, and artistic ends.1 Knowing that history "seems to be one of the most natural delights of the human mind," and that it is part of human nature to wish to escape from a complex present to a simpler, nobler past, Johnson seizes an opportunity to exploit a fashionable attitude to inspire patriotism and military prowess (Hazen 182). Sir Francis Drake was a ready-made heroic model. By the 1580s he had become legendary: "he was the poor boy who made good; the Jack the Giant Killer who defied and humiliated the greatest monarch in the European world; the Robin Hood of the sea" (Hampden 14). In John Stow's Annals, the best contemporary account , he is praised for his navigation, artillery, physics, memory, observation, and eloquence, and is said to be "as famous in Europe and America as Tamburlane in Asia and Africa" (808). His exploits could be read in pamphlet accounts written by participants in the voyages, Richard Hakluyt's...

Johnson's Use of Sources in the "Life of Sir Francis Drake"

Francis Drake, including many of most memorable transactions of reign of Queen Elizabeth, in which our long continued wars with Spaniards laid foundation of that settled animosity which yet continues between two nations. The Life of Sir Francis Drake (1740-41) was intended to serve same purpose as Life of Blake-to contrast feeble efforts of Sir Robert Walpole's administration, in pursuing War of Jenkins' Ear, with Britain's past naval glories-though is worth noting that Johnson, in announcement, points out that it is not only to his military virtues that his country owes reverence and gratitude. His fortitude in surmounting difficulties and encountering dangers of a different kind, his spirit in forming great designs, and his resolution in prosecuting them deserve to be proposed to imitation of every age; and we are more indebted to discoverer than soldier, as nation owes less of its wealth and power to its arms than to its navigation (10: 352). That Johnson for political purposes should turn to Elizabethan period, and to Drake in particular, as a standard against which his own age could be judged and found wanting initially seems surprising. But as early as London (1738) Johnson has poet and Thales kneel and kiss consecrated earth; /In pleasing dreams blissful age renew, / And call Britannia's glories back to (24-26), at sight of Greenwich, birthplace of Elizabeth. Here, at least for purposes of satire, Johnson shares romanticized view of history held by many of his contemporaries who looked to past, and particularly to reign of Elizabeth, as a time of great national pride and achievement. In his 1760 review of William Tytler's Historical and Critical Enquiry into casket letters of Mary Queen of Scots, he remarks, It has now been fashionable, for near half a century ... to exalt and magnify reign of Elizabeth and in Thoughts on Falkland's Islands (1771) he calls the reign of Elizabeth, favorite period of English greatness (1825 Works 6: 81; Works 10: 374). But given Johnson's skepticism, understanding of historical evidence, and zeal for truth, can there be any justification for such an exalted view of past?

Evelyn Waugh, Apprentice: The Early Writings, 1910-1927 , and: Waugh on Women (review)

Reviewed by: Evelyn Waugh, Apprentice: The Early Writings, 1910-1927, and: Waugh on Women A. A. DeVitis Robert Murray Davis , ed. Evelyn Waugh, Apprentice: The Early Writings, 1910-1927. Norman: Pilgrim, 1985. 214 pp. $34.95. Jacqueline McDonnell . Waugh on Women. New York: St. Martin's, 1986. 239 pp. $25.00. Evelyn Waugh, Apprentice, nicely edited by Robert Murray Davis, will not appeal to the general reader. For reading Waugh's earliest efforts at prose, poetry, and dialogue has much the same sort of charm that looking at faded childhood photographs of friends and acquaintances has—a very little goes a long way. But the reader who is interested in the youngster who became one of our century's most elegant stylists and stylish wits will relish the emergent voice that ultimately distinguished the mature artist. And in this collection it is possible both to hear and to enjoy that voice: "a great work of art can only be appreciated by a small portion of the world"; "It was said of him that he had once cut the headmaster in London because he met him wearing a brown overcoat with evening dress"; "The time has come to find something outrageous and original to say if you want a hearing." The piece titled "Conversion" gives the reader an appreciation of Waugh's ear for spoken language, and the poem titled "The World to Come" makes the reader grateful Waugh gave up poetry for prose. "The National Game," a story about biotherly influence, perhaps the most finished of the early pieces, concludes with the observation that money is better spent on "dining well and going to the theatre" than on cricket—everyone to one's own tastes, older brothers included. Jacqueline McDonnell's Waugh on Women exerts a peculiar fascination on the reader, for despite the fact that many of the observations are irrelevant to an appreciation or understanding of Waugh's artistry, they do suggest the creative processes and the relationship between the observed world and the world of the imagination. McDonnell's study, furthermore, indicates both the advantages and limitations of feminist criticism. [End Page 733] Attempting to identify from life the individuals who were transformed into characters in Waugh's fiction, McDonnell goes so far as to ascribe eye and hair color derived from various women of his acquaintance. This leads her to make meaningless statements: "There is much about Cordelia and Helena that is Lady Betejeman, and there is a lot that is not. Waugh's imagination obviously seized on various characteristics of his female friends, and he used some of the characteristics as seeds from which to grow his fictional characters. Evelyn Waugh enjoyed socializing with women, and from their company he gained an immediate ear for their language." McDonnell's attributions for such characters as Julia Stitch depend largely on her reading A Little Learning, the diaries, Christopher Sykes's biography, as well as statements by Auberon Waugh and others, and one cannot be certain that they are always correct. To determine exactly who inspired whom and in what degree would involve a great deal of reading and checking that ultimately suggests much ado about nothing. It appears likely, however, that someone will eventually deal with this matter, for gossip has its own charms. McDonnell's observations about the limited intelligence of Waugh's female characters are both provoking and provocative. She sees, for example, Waugh's most attractive women as largely "bitches"—here she quotes Sykes—but she fails to follow through. Does the satirical purpose or the comic form of the particular work permit a characterization of depth? To characterize Nina Blount of Vile Bodies as a woman who uses sex appeal for security and who wants only marriage obscures a mind-set occasioned by the economic depression of which she is a victim. The great need of Waugh's Bright Young People is for permanence, an observation made in that novel by Father Rothschild, S.J. in properly pompous rhetoric, the theme that emerges overtly in A Handful of Dust, again in Brideshead. As for Lady Marchmain, perhaps Waugh's most challenging female character, McDonnell observes that her "eyes are obviously so blue...

Disease and Vision: Perspectives on Poe's "The Sphinx"

DISEASE AND VISION: PERSPECTIVES ON POE'S "THE SPHINX" Elmar Schenkel Tübingen University In July, 1849, during a stay in Philadelphia, Edgar Allan Poe seems to have suffered from hallucinations that were probably due to great psychological strain. In a dream he was even told by an evil black bird that he had contracted cholera, of which there was an epidemic at the time.1 About five years before, Poe had written a short story in which he connected the threat of cholera with a peculiar vision. "The Sphinx," published in 1846, has been much neglected by critics who considered it a "slight tale"2 or saw in it mainly the satiric purpose "to call attention to the undue emphasis laid on democracy by those who see it too near them."3 It is true that this story of a man "who thinks he sees a huge animal on a distant hill, when in reality he has been looking at an insect"4 has not much to offer in terms of complexity, technique, and range of allusion if compared with Poe's more famous tales. Yet this should not altogether blind one to its important implications. The very first reading of the story will convince one that Poe's sidecut against democracy is not central to the text; it is just one possible interpretation reflecting the host's mind. That there is more to "The Sphinx" is shown by the manifold links that relate it to Poe's major works and make it, as it were, one more version of his fundamental imaginative matrix. There is the constellation of a narrator and his friend or relative sojourning in a secluded place, both of them inclined towards hypochondria . There is the enigmatic element alluded to in the title of the story, the Gothic horror for which there does not seem to be a rational solution. As in "The Fall of the House of Usher," this horror, like Foucault's "fantastique de bibliothèque," unfolds between a reader and his books: "These were of a character to force into germination whatever seeds of hereditary superstitions lay latent in my bosom." Poe's tale is informed by a characteristic nineteenth-century ambivalence in regard to books, for not only do they exhale unknown horrors which impinge upon reality but they also contain the answer to a riddle in which the host turns out to be a brother of Poe's Dupin and a forerunner of the psychoanalyst, of which Legrand in "The Gold-Bug" is another instance. The characteristic element of "The Sphinx" is to be found in the juxtaposition of a disease with a deceptive vision. The optical illusion, actually macropsia or a deficiency of the accommodation of the eye, from which the narrator suffers, has never been seen in the light of the epidemic he so much expatiates upon in the first half of the story. Yet 98Notes it might be claimed that his subsequent "misadmeasurement of propinquity " is due not only to his hypochondria but also to the possibility of his having contracted cholera himself. The impact of cholera in the nineteenth century is easily under-rated. Hundreds of books and pamphlets were written as a reaction to the various waves of this scourge which raged through India, the Middle East, and the Western world, including the United States, especially in the years 1832, 1848, and 1853, and which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Hastily constructed theories ranged from contagion to miasmatic origins.5 Even if there were numerous doctors who did not believe in its contagious nature, there was a widespread view that one had to avoid contaminated areas. A mass exodus from towns and cities could be precipitated simply by the rumor of an epidemic outbreak.6 Hence the narrator behaves in accordance with popular belief when he retires to the cottage orné on the banks of the Hudson. This belief in contagion is a necessary condition for the pathological atmosphere that surrounds the characters: "The very air from the South seemed to us redolent with death."7 The pathogenic circumstances are given more weight by the fact that the event occurs "near the close of...

Fauna in the Novels of Juan Goytisolo

REAL and imagined resemblances and relationships between animals and human beings have preoccupied writers from earliest times, and they have utilized animal imagery constantly throughout literature for derogatory, satirical, or sympathetic purposes. In contemporary Hispanic literature Ram6n Sender, Juan Jose Arreola, and Julio Cortizar, among others, have concentrated on the theme; but none has so consistently used animals iconoclastically as Juan Goytisolo. Goytisolo no doubt believes that Spanish society is a menagerie, a kind of backward jungle, inhabited by herds of sheep easily victimized by dictatorship, capitalism, tourism, the Catholic Church, and sexual frustrations. Spaniards suffer all of the savage aspects of animalistic living without any of the positive benefits to be derived from a more primitive and forceful life containing sexual and sadistic elements which help one to cope with a cruel and violent world. If the atmosphere of Spain is bestial, it is only natural that animals reside there. As the author ridicules the