Shared Assumption Research Articles

Sanctuary , Sexual Difference, and The Problem of Rape

To simply learn the word 'rape' is to take instruction in the power relationship between males and females. --Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will Traditional criticism of Sanctuary tends to see it as a novel about moral depravity, casting Temple Drake as the personification of evil. Recent challenges to that approach have attempted to rescue Temple's reputation, pointing out that she is not the agent but rather the recipient of harm. Traditional criticism and feminist criticism divide, then, in terms of where they locate the victim and victimizer in rape, one maintaining that Temple brought the rape on herself and the other arguing that Temple was a victim of it. But the reversals of subject/object, victim/victimizer do little to probe the novel's commentary on rape, gender relations, and social structures of power. Criticism of the novel is locked into this binary opposition because of its shared assumption that sexual difference is a biological reality. In order to move beyond reading Sanctuary and its characters in terms of categories that can find no safe harbor in the novel itself, sexual difference, specifically its articulation in rape, needs to be investigated. Women are essentialized in Sanctuary criticism as inherently rapable, always in one way or another asking to be raped. Elizabeth Kerr writes: By her disobedience in going with Gowan and her refusal to leave the Old Frenchman's Place, Temple initiated and stimulated the events leading to her rape.(1) Likewise, men are essentialized in the novel's criticism as brutes who have naturally violent desires.(2) Lawrence Kubie illustrates how naturalist ideas of sexuality provide the framework through which critics think about the novel: It is the uttermost limits of sour irony that this impudent, tantalizing, and provocative young girl, who had played fast and loose with the men of her own world without ever giving them the gift she kept dangling in front of them, should escape the relatively erotic purposes of the healthy members of the band, only to taunt the impotent and tortured figure of Popeye into committing a criminal assault upon her by artificial means.(3) Temple is a tease; men, with their healthy natural desires, are either tortured by her teasing or honest enough to molest her. As John Duvall points out in his discussion of Faulkner criticism and women, critics often rearticulate the sexist ideologies of the characters in the text.(4) Thus, while the text itself performs an insightful critique of these positions, the critics reinscribe them as viable--to the point of implicating their readers in their compliance with the gang rape presented in the novel.(5) In opposition to the naturalist discourse that attends most of its criticism, Sanctuary reveals an awareness of the social underpinnings of violence against women. The idea of sexual difference works as the ground for sexual violence--the inevitable result of innate, unchangeable biology. Sexual difference is in fact the excuse for sexual violence. Colette Guillaumin points out that society is divided into men and women, but that this is not based in biology: For there do exist in fact two groups in the heart of the society in which we live, two classes which are born of a social relationship, and whose social existence is masked by anatomico-sexual division (emphasis in the original).(6) The mask of biological sexual difference shields the face of social oppression. Monique Wittig concurs, when she explains that sexual difference expresses a social relationship of dominance and not a biological reality.(7) In Sanctuary rape is a matter of social bodies and not biological ones. The novel mocks the premise that biology is responsible for the discrepancies of power between men and women and instead locates sexual difference in social configurations of power. …

Chaucer’s Lollard Joke: History and the Textual Unconscious

Chaucer’s Lollard Joke: History and the Textual Unconscious

Writing as Paradox in Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Writing as Paradox in Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Jock Macleod (bio) Although Highly Esteemed by its Commentators in the English-Speaking world, Rilke's novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)1 has elicited a curious mix of responses. Nevertheless there is a shared assumption to much of this commentary. Perhaps filtered through the experience of Rilke's poetry (preoccupied as it is with essences and inwardness and the articulation of Being), many critics read the thematic concerns of the novel through a perceived opposition between being and existence. Thus for Peter Ruppert, "Malte's idea of a love that is pure subjectivity" is "an attempt to be rather than to exist" (Ruppert 33), while for Diana Festa-McCormick, "Paris has brought to the fore the meaninglessness of existence but, at the same time, the necessity of a full realization of one's being within the vacuum that entraps him" (Festa-McCormick 82). There are many variants of this. Malte's alienation as against "the law of his own being" (Crowhurst 63); "a transformation of everything external that is subject to physical laws and time, hence to transitoriness and death, into inner substance which takes of the feelings of subjective and personal identity" (Graff 249-250); the accidental versus the essential (Woods); appearances or images versus reality (Crowhurst); disintegration as opposed to integration (Kleinberger, Soken, Scholz); and so on: these are all employed by critics to get at much the same kind of opposition Ruppert is driving at. [End Page 403] Viewed in this light, Malte Laurids Brigge emerges as a quintessentially modernist text, especially when the opposition is given a specifically aesthetic inflection where the order of art is set over against the flux of existence (see, for example, Garber, Carvill, Segel, Parry, and Ziolkowski). In terms of the act of writing—one of the principal concerns of the novel—this opposition can be construed as a means by which the subject is integrated or unified through its mastery of the contingent world. In effect, the life becomes a kind of art-work itself, produced and unified by the sustained effort at writing that Rilke called "work." I want to argue that in Malte Laurids Brigge the act of writing is developed in a more complex way than this, and I want to come at it by suggesting that for Rilke being bears a much more intimate relation to existence than one of mastery. As the novel unfolds, Malte increasingly finds himself in situations where immersion in existence turns—almost magically—into the experience of being, so that the two experiences are simultaneously different and the same. Acting as conduits for the themes of death, love, the mask, and God, these situations are akin to the "limit-situations" of Jaspers and Heidegger. While Rilke's existential affiliations are often alluded to, this quite complex negotiation between being and existence in the novel has rarely been explored by English-speaking critics (exceptions here include Heller, Soken, Dürr, and Jayne). In the pages that follow, I want to develop an account of the concept of writing in Malte Laurids Brigge by showing how the novel maps out the effects of these "limit-situations" on Malte's ideas about the nature and purpose of writing.2 I argue that the novel effectively traces out a "learning curve" for Malte, taking him from an oppositional to a paradoxical framework. From a preoccupation with writing as a form of mastery and possession, he is eventually brought to a state where it functions analogously to the concept of love, a state where the writer is both master and servant at the same time. I However committed Rilke is to the realm of "pure being" (Crowhurst 75), what is striking about Malte Laurids Brigge is its fascination with sensations, with the brute physicality of the world of existence. Malte's descriptions of his experiences in Paris, for instance, take on a tactile dimension in episode after episode. The following is quite typical: I was hungry. I had gone the whole day without eating. But even now I couldn't wait there for the eggs; before they were ready, something drove me...

Malign Analysts or Evil Empire?: Western Images of Soviet Nuclear Strategy

Exasperated Kremlinologists are overly fond of citing Winston Churchill's description of the Soviet Union as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.1 Their unspoken but shared assumption is that puzzle, riddle, and enigma are of Soviet origin. It is certainly true that the authoritarian nature of the Soviet state, its peculiar blend of foreign ideology and native Russian tradition together with its irritating and pervasive concern for secrecy, makes it a difficult subject of study. Western students of Soviet affairs ought nevertheless to accept their fair share of the blame for the confusion that surrounds our un-

Extreme case formulations: A way of legitimizing claims

This paper has described three uses of Extreme Case formulations The interactants in the illustrations were engaged in several types of activities, among which were complaining, accusing, justifying, and defending. As concluding remarks, a few comments will be made about why participants use Extreme Case formulations in these activities. Part of the business of complaining involves portraying a situation as a legitimate complainable. This may take the form of protraying the offense committed and/or the suffering endured in a way such that it would not be dismissed as minor. So as to legitimize a complaint and portray the complainable situation as worthy of the complaint, a speaker may portray the offense and/or the suffering with Extreme Case formulations. In both accusing and defending, participants ofyen present their strongest cases, including specifying Extreme Cases of their claims. Part of justifying a course of actions may involve portraying the precipitating circumstance as necessitating the action. The precipitating circumstance may be a problem circumstance which is portrayed as unfair, immoral, embarrassing, uncomfortable, or in some other way undesirable and/or intolerable. There is a shared assumption that the worse the problem, the more necessary it is to do something about it. In justifying, speakers use Extreme Case formulations to portray the circumstances that precipitated their actions as demanding their actions. A problem that participants have when engaged in, or reflecting on, conflicts, complaints, criticism, compliments, praise, etc. is to attribute the cause of the phenomenon. Who or what is responsible for the conflictual, complainable, praise-worthy state of affairs? One method that is used to determine what or who is responsible, i.e. to make an attribution, involves comparing the case in question to other similar cases. Through this procedure, persons determine that they are (are not) responsible for the state of affairsin questions. Extreme Case proportional formulations (‘everyone,’ ‘all,’ ‘every time’) are used to indicate that any individual member of that category is not responsible for the state of affairs; that responsibility is to be attributed elsewhere. The social order essentially is a moral order (Garfinkel, 1967). One of the ways of knowing what is acceptable and right is by finding out how people behave. There often is a shared assumption operating (one that is called into question on occasion): how people behave tells us what is the right way to behave. Proportional measures reporting the frequency or prevalence of practices are used to propose and substantiate the rightness and wrongness of those practices. Extreme Case formulations (‘all the time,’ ‘everybody,’ ‘no one’) propose behaviors are acceptable and right or unacceptable and wrong.

The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century

“Young man, how dare you meddle with Our Shakespeare!” Thus threatened an anonymous lady, shaking her fist in the face of the designer for Nigel Playfair’s futurist As You Like It. By the end of Professor Styan’s The Shakespeare Revolution, such dinosaurs have been reduced to geophysical irrelevance, and “the real Shakespeare” authentically discovered. This is the record (substantively, from the Victorian era to 1970) of a triumphal historic progress, the change in our perception of Shakespeare in the theatre and in the study. Its heroes are William Poel, Harley Granville-Barker, Tyrone Guthrie, and Peter Brook. Its symbolic villains are Beerbohm Tree, A.C. Bradley (“Bradley’s great book may in time be seen as a disaster”), and, most sinister, closet Shakespeare. (“Closet Shakespeare was soon to receive a shattering blow.”) The dual theme here is the evolution of superior methods in the theatre, and the rapprochement between theatre and scholarship. Its conclusion is a serene accord between stage and study based on equal status and a shared assumption, “the perception of the plays as blueprints for performance.” All this is set down with a deft and wide-ranging touch. Cambridge, be it said, have done well to produce a book with so much text and 18 plates for so modest a price (albeit the proofreading is not impeccable), and this book deserves to be on the shelf of every Shakespearean, of whichever tribe. It is an authoritative statement of a ruling orthodoxy.