Sophie's Choice Research Articles

The Bluest Sky by Christina Diaz Gonzalez

Reviewed by: The Bluest Sky by Christina Diaz Gonzalez Wesley Jacques Gonzalez, Christina Diaz The Bluest Sky. Knopf, 2022 [320p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780593372791 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593372814 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 5-8 Bookish, baseball-loving sixth grader Héctor has no interest in giving up his beloved Cuba, his twin best friends and neighbors Teo and Isabel, or his dreams of proudly representing his country in the upcoming International Math Olympiad. Circumstances in the Caribbean nation, however, are changing rapidly in 1980 and his mother is determined to reunite with Héctor and his older brother's dissident gusano father in the United States. While he may not fully grasp the dangers and anxieties of the political climate, Héctor thoughtfully narrates a seemingly sudden shift from being a proud child of the revolution as his family becomes targets of actos de repudio, peppering Cuban Spanish idioms and phrases throughout. It is an acto de repudio that leads to Teo's untimely death as a violent mob falls upon Héctor's home when rumors of his mother's plan to expatriate spread. As Héctor, his mother, and brother abandon all they know for the precarious journey to the U.S., they face violent retaliation and bureaucratic challenges, including a Sophie's Choice of a decision at the port that may split the family apart indefinitely. A bittersweet ending poignantly recontextualizes the importance of family in the face of political divisions. [End Page 49] Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Interview with Novelist Sarah Bird

Interview with Novelist Sarah Bird Richard J. Golsan (bio) Richard J. Golsan (RJG): What is your favorite novel? Sarah Bird (SB): My comfort food novel, the one I pulled out back in those high anxiety days when we were bleaching our groceries was Dog of the South by the inimitable Charles Portis. RJG: When did you first discover this novel? SB: Charles Portis arrived at a golden moment in my reading life. I was in my late-twenties, so this would have been late-Seventies, early eighties. Though I wasn't exactly conscious of it, I was groping my way toward writing comic novels. I was probably set on this path early by my wildly idiosyncratic family. We were six children in a military family that moved far, far too much for our group of pathologically shy introverts. In endless drives, flights, and ocean crossings to an endless succession of new bases we formed a sort of six-way twinship. The only humans we were actually comfortable with were each other. We were able to endure the purgatories of our new schools with their bewildering assault of strangers because, at the end of each day, we could go home and lose ourselves in books. Books seemed to simply filter into our lives the way food, borne on underground ocean currents, filters into an amoeba. We'd reach out and ingest whatever reading matter a sib introduced into our biosphere and it would be digested and absorbed into our hermetic little world. My sisters who adored all non-human animals infected us with Watership Down and we all joyfully re-entered our lost childhood worlds of talking animals. To this day we will praise an exceptionally fine meal in Lapine, calling it "flay-rah." Or note that a surprised or perplexed sibling has "gone tharn." If feeling particularly frisky we might even pretend to freeze in fear, "go tharn," at the sound of the rabbit's greatest enemy, those gas-powered monsters, the "hrududil." We re-enacted Eliza's escape on the ice floes from Uncle Tom's Cabin with flattened packing boxes from our latest move strewn across the backyard of whatever base house we'd been assigned. At the Base Pool [End Page 178] we pretended to be either Karana from Island of the Blue Dolphins or the dolphins she befriended. We all wept together while reading Sophie's Choice and Confessions of Nat Turner. But the novel that marked the Before and After in our hive mind reading was Confederacy of Dunces. RJG: What was it about "Confederacy" that spoke to all of you? SB: This is simple: It made us laugh. I probably would have chosen Dunces as my pandemic comfort food book except that I've read and re-read it too many times. Also, it feels a bit too claustrophobic for a pandemic. Dog, a road trip novel, is far more expansive. I'm going to have delay speaking of my love of Dog for a moment to set the stage for its arrival, so back to Dunces. I had the glorious experience of encountering John Kennedy Toole's masterpiece without knowing a thing about it when my youngest brother, who was studying bio-chemical engineering at the time, stuck it in my hands, and said, "Read." One way to understand how sui generis Dunces was is to consider the authors Toole's posthumous 1981 Pulitzer was sandwiched between: Cheever, Updike, and Mailer. Imagine going, for example, from Cheever's overachieving characters awakening to the emptiness of their lives in the suburbs to Ignatius J. Reilly, the ultimate outsider, an oafish, obese, scabrous gargantuan, as dedicated to self-abuse as he is to the Middle Ages. This novel plugged into my family's genome like a missing strand of DNA. We lived that novel like no other. We christened our mother "Santa Battaglia," took to cursing "Fortuna, that vicious slut," and excused any dyspeptic behavior by explaining that our "valve had plopped shut." For a very long time after, all our reading sought to duplicate the experience of Dunces. My youngest brother introduced Sotweed Factor into our literary food stream and we milked a few...

Sophie's choice: Narratives of ‘saving’ in British public debates on abortion

In the UK, narratives about saved women and babies have been a significant feature in anti-abortion campaigns to oppose bufferzones, which seek to prevent anti-abortion activists from being directly outside abortion clinics. Anti-abortion activists argue that without their presence, the ‘abortion industry’ will fail to seek ‘informed’ consent and coerce women into abortions. These presumptions are based on positioning abortion, and service providers, as inherently ‘evil’, whilst saving is rooted in Christian beliefs aimed at ensuring that souls go to heaven.This paper emerges from ethnographic research in Britain on anti-abortion activism and pro-choice counter-demonstrations. Highlighting the importance of saving in many of the anti-abortion campaigns, it will argue that as they have a different conceptualisations of harm to pro-choice activists, this leads to a lack of understanding of each other's saving narrative. Yet to some extent they both draw on a positioning of women as potentially vulnerable and at risk from the actions of others.

Sophie's choice: The costs of the COVID-19 pandemic versus the costs of its “treatment”

Sophie's choice: The costs of the COVID-19 pandemic versus the costs of its “treatment”

Collective Health and a Sophie's Choice: to defend privacy in cyberspace.

The world is currently experiencing complex threats to privacy in health (PH) in the context of the growing virtualization of bodies and biographies exposed in social networks. This paper aims to identify the approaches to PH in Brazilian scientific production in the light of Collective Health (CH). This is an exploratory, analytical-descriptive study reviewingpapers from Brazilian Collective Health journals of excellence from 2000 to 2017. Papers employing PH as their object were selected for further analysis. We found that papers are commonly anchored in the perspective that the "professional's fear of punishment" is the borderline inhibiting PH violation actions. However, neither the legal-normative framework nor the technological security apparatus sufficed. In the Unified Health System (SUS), threats escalate in initiatives of the SUS Card, PEP, Regulatory Centers and Telehealth. The results corroborate a hypothetic gap in the production of the subject in Collective Health journals of excellence. The discussion is about institutional omission; adoption of the ICF for the use of individual data; opacity on the revenue of public expenditure in the technological security apparatus. Respect for PH must bethe result of a political-ethical agreement, in which all start to act ethically in defense of privacy by choice and not coercion and fear of penalties.

Sophie's Choice on the Nation's Health.

Sophie's Choice on the Nation's Health.

The subject of Holocaust fiction

Introduction Prologue: Ghostwriting the Holocaust: The Ghost Writer, The Diary, The Kindly Ones, and Me Section One: Psychoanalytic Listening and Fictions of the Holocaust 1. Voyeurism, Complicated Mourning, and the Fetish: Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl 2. Forced Confessions: Subject Position, Framing, and the Art of Spiegelman's Maus 3. Aryeh Lev Stollman's Far Euphrates: Re-picturing the Pre-Memory Moment Section Two: Golems, Ghosts, Idols, and Messiahs: Complicated Mourning and the Inter-textual Construction of a Jewish Symptom 4. Bruno Schulz, the Messiah, and Ghost/writing the Past 5. A Jewish History of Blocked Mourning and Love 6. See Under: Mourning Section Three: Mourning Becomes the Nations: Styron, Schlink, Sebald 7. Blacks, Jews, and Southerners in William Styron's Sophie's Choice 8. (Re)Reading the Holocaust from a German Point of View: Berhard Schlink's The Reader 9. Mourning and Melancholia in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz Epilogue: Holocaust, Apartheid, and the Slaughter of Animals: J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and Cora Diamond's Difficulty of Reality Notes Bibliography Index

Sophie's Choice: Social Attitudes to Welfare State Retrenchment in Bailed-Out Portugal

This article examines social attitudes towards social rights in Portugal. It utilizes original survey data from 2013 to study the distribution of welfare attitudes in a context of economic austerity and welfare retrenchment. The main argument is that there are at least two sources of preference-formation regarding public social provision: one is universalistic (or needs-based), the other is contributory. These two logics frame choices concerning the future of the welfare state in Portugal. We explore the determinants of this choice through three hypotheses: dualization between insiders and outsiders (H1); the type of welfare regime (H2), and social rights consciousness (H3). Our findings suggest that choice between universalistic and contributory models is not impervious to macro-institutional factors and labour market performance. The paper’s main contribution, however, is to empirically demonstrate that this choice is significantly shaped by pre-existing understandings of social rights in Portugal, namely its politically contested character.

Nazi Children, Christian Anti-Semitism, and the New Atheist in William Styron's Sophie's Choice

Traditional atheists believe that the loss of faith leads to melancholic mourning. New atheists, by contrast, consider the God-concept to be a hideous human invention, so they rejoice rather than mourn on the occasion of God's death. Sophie is a traditional atheist early in the novel Sophie's Choice , but she is a new atheist by the end. What leads to her transformation is her realization that Christianity made the Nazis believe that exterminating the Jews was a political necessity. She makes this discovery in a conversation with the eleven-year-old Emmi, the daughter of the Commandant of Auschwitz.

Violation of Human Rights in Holocaust/Post-Holocaust Era

The essay diachronically compares some declarations of man's rights such as Tom Paine's Rights of Man, the French Declaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen (1789) and, much later and after World War II, the Charter of the United Nations (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) in order to understand how the concept of ``human rights'' has evolved across time. The triumph of human rights is rooted in paradox and in their principles' patent violations during the age of the Holocaust. One of the most horrible consequences of the violation of human rights in that period consisted in the survivors' being doomed to silence for more than twenty years. The survivors' words had to confront the resistance of language to represent what sounded as unrepresentable and the people's refusal to listen: they were deprived even of the right to speak. The problem of authenticity and inauthenticity is called into question, recalling Geoffrey Hartman's Scars of the Spirit. From this perspective, the paper examines John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments (1996) and William Styron's Sophie's Choice (1982), thus centring its focus on children's rights.

Reforming the past: the challenges faced by Obamacare

Reforming the past: the challenges faced by Obamacare

Foreign Bodies:

Foreign Bodies:

Intrusive Narrators: The Representation of Narration and Narrators in the Operatic Adaptations of The Great Gatsby and Sophie's Choice

Intrusive Narrators: The Representation of Narration and Narrators in the Operatic Adaptations of The Great Gatsby and Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice—A Contemporary Ideal

Abstract In the August 14, 2011, issue of The New York Times Magazine, an article about selective abortion in multiple-gestation pregnancies highlights some of the moral distress accompanying this practice. The overall tenor of the piece, however, is devoid of moral calculation, and seems to proffer unabashedly the option of abortion. In this editorial, Dr. DeMarco provides a clear and direct commentary of the magazine article. He effectively supplies the moral analysis, which was conspicuously absent from the article, and calls for an honest appraisal of choices made.

The Theology of Nazi Anti-Semitism in William Styron's Sophie's Choice

With regard to the representation of the Holocaust, William Styron's Sophie's Choice has occasioned much controversy. The central issue, as Alan L. Berger claims, is Styron's failure “to comprehend...

Can Sophie's choice be adequately captured by cold computation of minimizing losses? An fMRI study of vital loss decisions.

The vast majority of decision-making research is performed under the assumption of the value maximizing principle. This principle implies that when making decisions, individuals try to optimize outcomes on the basis of cold mathematical equations. However, decisions are emotion-laden rather than cool and analytic when they tap into life-threatening considerations. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this study investigated the neural mechanisms underlying vital loss decisions. Participants were asked to make a forced choice between two losses across three conditions: both losses are trivial (trivial-trivial), both losses are vital (vital-vital), or one loss is trivial and the other is vital (vital-trivial). Our results revealed that the amygdala was more active and correlated positively with self-reported negative emotion associated with choice during vital-vital loss decisions, when compared to trivial-trivial loss decisions. The rostral anterior cingulate cortex was also more active and correlated positively with self-reported difficulty of choice during vital-vital loss decisions. Compared to the activity observed during trivial-trivial loss decisions, the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum were more active and correlated positively with self-reported positive emotion of choice during vital-trivial loss decisions. Our findings suggest that vital loss decisions involve emotions and cannot be adequately captured by cold computation of minimizing losses. This research will shed light on how people make vital loss decisions.

Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity (review)

Reviewed by: Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity Christopher Bigsby Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity, by Gene A. Plunka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 446 pp. $99.00. In 1965, I saw the British production of Arthur Miller's After the Fall. It was staged in Coventry, a city that had been mercilessly bombed in the Second World War, the ruins of the cathedral being close to the theatre. I was so impressed [End Page 142] by the play, with its dominating image of a concentration camp tower, that when I read a newspaper article about the guilt of the survivor I sent it to Miller who was then convalescing from hepatitis in a British hospital. He replied immediately confirming its centrality to the play. Miller had visited Mauthausen just three years earlier and then the Frankfurt trials of concentration camp guards. These experiences changed him. He had, to be sure, written a novel about American antisemitism (Focus) in 1945, but otherwise his connection with his Jewishness had remained problematic. Now it moved close to the center of his work and did so at a time when others, too, chose to register the delayed shock of the Holocaust. What followed was Incident at Vichy, and Broken Glass, works explored by Gene A. Plunka in his study of Holocaust drama, subtitled The Theater of Atrocity. The fact is that drama was as slow in responding to the Holocaust as any other genre. Though there are now those who insist that it was widely discussed, in fact, for the most part, silence had seemed to many the only legitimate response, the silence of trauma, of respect, of willed forgetfulness. For Miller, the Holocaust was a story of defeat, for the Jews but more widely for everyone. In Israel the preferred narrative was of resistance. There was no space for stories of victimhood. Beyond that, where were the words adequate to address an event that seemed to lie equally outside of history and language? To bring it within history and language was in some sense to normalize what lay beyond discourse, beyond the parameters of rational discussion. There were others, though, for whom silence was acquiescence, collaboration, denial. What was needed above all was to speak out, to recall, to testify. In the Vilna ghetto, in Lithuania, librarian Hermann Kruk might declare, "In a cemetery there can be no theatre," as Elie Wiesel would announce that there could be no such thing as a Holocaust novel since if it was a novel it could not be about the Holocaust and if it was about the Holocaust it could not be a novel. Only memoirs, eye witness accounts, he believed, had legitimacy, though Primo Levi confessed that a book "drenched in memory" could not be accurate. There were, however, such novels and there were such plays, even in Vilna, and Gene A. Plunka has written a startlingly comprehensive study of the latter. He quotes Alvin Goldfarb as identifying 257 Holocaust plays by 1997. Holocaust Drama, though, is not an encyclopedia. Plunka explores a number of such works in an attempt to assess their faithfulness to the events that provoked them. It was Yeats who warned against unearned emotion, in other words the emotion casually generated by subject matter. There would be writers for whom the concentration camp provided little more than a convenient location. One such was William Styron, with Sophie's Choice. The plays Plunka [End Page 143] invokes and analyzes are not such, even as he readily engages with the question of legitimacy. Plunka ranges widely. Some of the plays are well known—Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, Peter Weiss's The Investion, Peter Flannery's Singer, Joshua Sobol's Ghetto—but many more are not. One of the virtues of this book, however, is the extent to which it ranges across national literatures as it also explores different aspects of the Holocaust. In the background, sometimes breaking surface and sometimes not, are the rumbling debates and arguments that greeted some of these works, indeed, more profoundly, that were stirred up by any attempt to understand something which seemed to resist analysis. Hannah Arendt seemed to lay blame at...

Haunted Heroines: The Gothic Imagination and the Female Bildungsromane of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and L. M. Montgomery

Haunted Heroines:The Gothic Imagination and the Female Bildungsromane of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and L. M. Montgomery Kathleen Ann Miller (bio) Using its popular competition "The Great Wednesday Compare," John Mutford's literary online discussion forum "The Book Mine Set" posted a challenge in 2007, asking readers to vote on whether Jane Austen or L. M. Montgomery, best known for her canonical children's classic Anne of Green Gables (AGG), was their favorite author.1 One blogger responded, "Wow, I'm really surprised at the number of people picking Montgomery over Austen! Although L. M. Montgomery has a huge place in my heart, I'm going to have to vote for Jane again. . . . It makes me sad not to be able to vote for Montgomery, which I would have done if she'd been up against almost anyone else." Many bloggers offered similar sentiments; the "Sophie's choice" of selecting between Montgomery and Austen proved, for many, almost too much to bear.2 By examining message boards and blog posts, we can see that, especially for female readers, these two authors share a hallowed place in the collective memory, due to girls' culture and youthful reading. Both authors have created texts that female readers read and re-read, generation after generation; and their works have earned not only devotion, but international popularity and successful film and merchandising industries. Yet, despite a host of similarities linking them, there have been few critical discussions that consider Austen and Montgomery together. According to Miriam Rheingold Fuller, whose "Jane of Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery's Reworking of Austen's Legacy" (2009) is the first critical study to undertake an extended comparison of Austen and Montgomery, "Many 'Janeites' are 'Anneites' too, and for very similar reasons: Austen and Montgomery both write domestic romances in rural settings; both critique society's mistreatment of women; and, most significantly, both create compelling, memorable heroines." She continues, [End Page 125] The connections between Anne Shirley, Austen's heroines, and Montgomery herself are extremely complex. . . . I believe Montgomery enjoyed Austen's novels because she strongly identified—or in some cases wished to identify—with her heroines, and that she incorporates many elements of Austen's plots and heroines in the first three Anne books3 to help rewrite her own life through writing Anne's.4 Fuller claims that Anne's experience rewrites the romantic scenarios of Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot in order to "alter them to reshape her fictional self and to comment on Austen's treatment of her heroines". Although Fuller does cite examples connecting Montgomery's Anne to other heroines in Austen's fiction, Fuller is most concerned with Montgomery's repetition and manipulation of Austen's courtship narratives, in both her fiction and her journals. In her essay's opening, though, Fuller also asserts that Anne is like an Austen heroine other than Elizabeth, Emma, or Anne, because she "frightens herself with Gothic fancies." Here Fuller makes a direct allusion to the heroine of Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Catherine Morland, and indirectly references one of the most memorable scenes in Anne of Green Gables (AGG, 1908), the incident of the Haunted Wood. Although Austen's Northanger Abbey offers an extended satire of the Gothic genre, Montgomery uses the brief, but unforgettable, Gothic intrusion of the Haunted Wood for parodic and didactic purposes similar to Austen's. In both Northanger Abbey and AGG, Gothic intrusions into these realistic female bildungsromane serve as a means of social instruction for the heroines and discipline for their Gothic imaginations. Moreover, these texts suggest that correct reading practices can lead to right uses of reason in the social sphere and that novels can further the goal of female education—both for their heroines and for their readers. Furthermore, Austen and Montgomery posit that once the false teachings of Gothic romances—their improper reading and imaginative practices—are swept away, then the heroines will be prepared for their own real-life romantic courtship narratives. Ultimately, though each writer cautions against letting the female imagination run wild, neither writer denies the power of the imagination nor suggests that a woman's life can be negotiated through reason...

The politics of visualizing an imperial demise: transforming a Byzantine chronicle into a Sicilian visual narrative

A large, brightly painted, gilded image renders in graphic detail the discarding of the body of a slain Byzantine emperor, blood still dripping from his neck. On the middle of the same page in this...

The Holocaust Novel (review)

Reviewed by: The Holocaust Novel David Patterson The Holocaust Novel, by Efraim Sicher. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. 261 pp. $22.36. The Holocaust Novel by Efraim Sicher is an excellent overview of the fundamentals for any basic study of the Holocaust novel. The book is thoroughly researched and well written. In his preface Sicher presents a good discussion of the generic question of whether the words Holocaust and novel can even be put together. Part of the Routledge series "Genres in Context," the book's primary concern is with the literary contexts of the Holocaust novel as a genre unto itself. And Sicher firmly situates his examination of the Holocaust novel within those contexts. He explains very well why such a genre is legitimate and what distinguishes it from other genres. In Chapter 1, "About the Holocaust Novel," Sicher does a good job of distinguishing the Holocaust from other catastrophes. Here he provides the reader with a good overview of the classic American writers of Holocaust novels, [End Page 208] including Elie Wiesel, Jerzy Kosinski, Elbieta Ettinger, and Ilona Karmel. He adds Israeli authors, such as Ka-tzetnik 135633, Aharon Appelfeld, Haim Gouri, and Yoram Kaniuk. Next he covers German and Austrian writers, such as Jurek Becker, Ilse Aichinger, and Jakov Lind. Then there are the French writers, including André Schwarz-Bart, Anna Langfus, and Piotr Rawicz. Sicher also mentions novelists from other countries in his thorough overview of a long-standing body of Holocaust novels. In the subsequent chapters of this book for beginners, Sicher focuses on specific authors in various categories of novels before ending with his excellent bibliographic essay and his essay on recommended reading. In Chapter 2 he offers good synopses of novels written by survivors. These include Night by Elie Wiesel, If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi, Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld, and The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. In Chapter 3, titled "The American Post-Holocaust Novel," Sicher deftly explores the difficulties facing novelists who have nothing but their imagination to rely on. After presenting the reader with a concise and highly perceptive introduction to this general area of the genre, Sicher focuses on some of the classic examples of the American post-Holocaust novel. Authors and works explicated here include Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker, Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's Anya, and Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl. In Chapter 4, "Holocaust Fictions, or Fictional Holocausts," Sicher examines the tension between history and fiction in several familiar Holocaust novels. Works that come under scrutiny here include William Styron's Sophie's Choice, Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List, and Anatoli Kuznetsov's Babi Yar. In this chapter Sicher expands on his generally descriptive approach to the Holocaust novel and delves deeper into an analysis of the difficulties and the implications of writing fiction about a historical event. And he does a good job of it. In Chapter 5, "The 'Second Generation': The Vicarious Witnesses," Sicher's concern lies with the novels written by children of Holocaust survivors. He opens this chapter with a consideration of exactly who constitutes the "second generation." He follows this introduction with an excellent description of novels that cut across national boundaries, including those by M. J. Bukiet, Thane Rosenbaum, Art Spiegelman, David Grossman, Henri Raczymow, Myriam Anissimov, Patrick Modiano, Carl Friedman, and others. He ends his discussion of second-generation novels with an insightful exploration of the question of where and how the second generation might lead a third generation of Holocaust novelists. Finally, in Chapter 6, "Postmodern 'holocausts,'" Sicher turns his attention to yet another category of Holocaust novels, namely the postmodern Holocaust [End Page 209] novel. In this chapter we have one of the unique aspects of Sicher's study; it is what makes Sicher's study truly important to today's student of the Holocaust novel. In this chapter, after considering what the term postmodern means when applied to the Holocaust novel, he takes a detailed look at several postmodern Holocaust novelists. Among these are Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, Emily Prager, Anne Michaels, Raymond Federman, Ian McEwan, and others. In The Holocaust Novel Sicher does an...