Specific Literary Texts Research Articles

Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: Where All Things Are Possible ed. by Susan David Bernstein (review)

Reviewed by: Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: Where All Things Are Possible ed. by Susan David Bernstein Kathleen Davidson (bio) Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: Where All Things Are Possible edited by Richard D. Fulton and Peter H. Hoffenberg; pp. 220. Burlington: Ashgate, 2013. $124 cloth. Britain’s presence in the South Pacific has been the subject of many publications. Early studies typically focused on the imperial voyages of the eighteenth century. In recent years, these accounts of Enlightenment exploration and science have been complemented by valuable and fascinating studies of how the Victorians engaged with the South Pacific. By their very nature, investigations into the Victorian period tend to be much more amorphous in scope—involving the travels of individuals and independent groups, including missionaries, more than government-sponsored expeditions and navigating a much expanded field of visual and literary media. The [End Page 256] subtitle of Richard Fulton and Peter Hoffenberg’s edited volume highlights the huge range of possibilities this vast geographical area offered to nineteenth-century travellers, writers, artists, and their audiences. Indeed, the editors claim that “it would be difficult to fully understand the Victorians as they understood themselves without considering their individual and collective engagement with Oceania” (1). In this essay collection, Oceania not only stirs the Victorian imagination but also—as the subtitle suggests—becomes a metaphor for it, with both being characterized as realms “where all things are possible.” Fulton and Hoffenberg’s introduction outlines just how multifarious and fluid the Victorians’ interests in the Pacific were, and, accordingly, the twelve essays that follow cover quite a bit of ground. However, the volume’s rationale and structure are convincing and logical. The editors are quick to point out that “the authors take specific literary and cultural moments and texts … exploring each one to help us better understand the meanings of the Victorian engagement with places such as Samoa, the Kingdom of Hawai’i and Australasia, as well as their engagement with the [visual and literary] forms from which they gained knowledge of those places”—thus considering not only why Oceania was significant as a subject but “also how and why those forms of representation also mattered” (2). Paradoxically, though, photography, travel writing, and international exhibitions, which brought Oceania to Victorian audiences, “struggled to normalize the exotic, or at least make it comprehensible and less dangerous” (2), and also to capture adequately the ephemeral nature of many Pacific encounters and the instability of identities and ideologies when exposed to the simpler lifestyles on the “uncivilized” periphery. Missionaries’ accounts played an enormously influential role in shaping Britons’ perceptions of the Pacific from the 1790s onward. Many contemporary and subsequent representations of Oceania simply reiterated or embellished their views of an Arcadia whose inhabitants were childlike in their innocence but could be ferocious and cruel as well. Consequently, even toward the end of the Victorian era, Oceania remained an alluring though risky destination and an imagined escape from the day-to-day existence of industrial England. To delve into this legacy and trace the circulation of associated ideas, Oceania and the Victorian Imagination is arranged in three sections: “Travel, Exhibitions and Photography”; “Fiction and the Pacific”; and “Childhood and Children.” In traversing both the visual culture and the literature of the period, this format presents a perfect opportunity to examine systematically some of the many Victorian publications that combined different media, as well as the practices of individuals who were active in both fields. Yet, most of the volume’s authors confine their focus to a single medium. Sylvie Largeaud-Ortega and Carla Manfredi consider Robert Louis Stevenson’s experiences in the Pacific, tackling the subject in separate sections and in quite different ways. Largeaud-Ortega uses Stevenson’s short story “The Isle of Voices” (1893) [End Page 257] to address his views on Pacific Islanders’ perceptions of Victorians and of themselves; interestingly, this theme has been touched on elsewhere, by art historian Leonard Bell in relation to a number of photographic portraits of Stevenson and his “family” in Samoa (Bell 309–26). Notably, Manfredi pays considerable attention to Stevenson’s visual interests—including his attraction to phantasmagorias—and makes some intriguing links between...

The Last Will of Metropolitan Constantine I of Kiev and the Kanon “At the Parting of the Soul from the Body”

The article puts forward the suggestion that the mysterious last will of Metropolitan Constantine I of Kiev, in which he ordered that after his death his body should be torn to pieces by dogs instead of receiving a proper burial, was inspired by a very specific literary text. This text is still used in the Orthodox Christian tradition; it is known as the hymnographical kanon “At the Parting of the Soul from the Body.” While nowadays this kanon is used in the course of an ordinary liturgical rite, in the 12th century, when it first appeared, it was used among some Byzantine intellectual and ascetic circles as a particular element of personal piety. The 12th century is exactly the epoch of Constantine's activities, and the description of а funeral procedure given by this kanon is very close to the last will of Constantine. The kanon “At the Parting of the Soul from the Body” has close ties to another hymn of roughly the same epoch—the “Penitential” kanon written after the 5th chapter of the “Ladder” of John Climacus. Both kanons conceal a didactic story under the structure of a hymnographic pattern. What is more important, both are from the very beginning intertwined with a distinct illustrative program: each monostrophe is accompanied by a specific picture, which discloses the contents of the text. These “comics-like” stories have no parallel among other Byzantine kanons. Finally, both kanons witness the growth of the influence of Palestinian and, more generally, Eastern ascetic traditions on the monastic practices of Constantinople and its surrounding regions. This influence was associated, most of all, with the Evergetian movement, with its strict disciplinary and fasting rules, etc. Metropolitan Constantine, who was an outstanding representative of the Byzantine intellectual elite of those times, should have been acquainted—at the very least!—with this movement. Moreover, the conflicts of the bishops in his circle with the Russian princes concerning the fasting discipline suggest that Constantine was trying to introduce the new Evergetian ascetic standards among the Russians. Thus, the literal adherence to the provisions of the kanon “At the Parting of the Soul from the Body” at the funeral of Metropolitan Constantine Ι should be interpreted as a sign of his full confidence in his ideals.

Imitation, Emulation, Influence, and Pound's Poetic Renewal

Imitation, Emulation, Influence, and Pound's Poetic Renewal

Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (review)

Reviewed by: Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England Marvin Sasser Picciotto, Joanna. Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. 880 pp. Labors of Innocence superbly investigates how seventeenth-century thinkers appropriated an innocent Adam as an intellectual model to understand experimentalist science, intellectual labor, and the creation of a public sphere. Picciotto situates her work at the intersections of science and literature and traces the development of this relationship in early modern England. Along the way she explains how these thinkers transformed curiosity—originally accepted as a vice resulting from original sin—into a virtue, reimagined labor as a way to overcome the Fall instead of a punishment for it, and separated innocence from ignorance by associating it with epistemological objectivity. After tracking “an ethic of imitatio Adami” across multiple disciplines, Picciotto convincingly asserts that intellectuals used this Adam as an model to understand paradise and the concept of objectivity, and “according to this ethos, it is by performing the work of defamiliarization that contemplation becomes productive, [End Page 61] a means of working on and transforming the world” (2). Picciotto divides her work into two parts, centering the first, “Contexts,” within the discourse of imitatio Adami. Chapter 1, for instance, addresses issues surrounding typological representations of the prelapsarian self, the hortus conclusus, and the doctrine of the felix cupa. She focuses on how the prehistory of Adam, the garden, and the trial shaped various facets of social, religious and political imaginations, but primarily figured only in intellectual life before 1660. However, by the late seventeenth-century, the “delving Adam” had become a “specifically intellectual laborer” and the “mystical body… public” (40). Picciotto further suggests that paradise and purgatory were released concurrently into the world, and she explains how “the effort to restore creation as a commons of knowledge production, an open field in which innocent curiosity could assert itself, and evolve, converted the hortus conclusus into a purgatorial paradise of pains” (40). The rest of part I follows the development of the early modern scientific community throughout the Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration. Chapter 2 explains the founding of the Royal Society of London (1660) and its production of a “new kind of gentleman,” or “virtuoso,” who was the “product of a distinctly Adamic ideal of representativeness” (131). Chapter 3 posits the “literary lens” as a key metaphor for Picciotto’s discussion since it was an “instrument of empirical demystification… applied to the fallen world” and served as a kind of “tool with which to excavate the material causes of the visible and open the world up to new kinds of cultivation” (16, 188–89). Finally, chapter 4 links the new concept of the public person with “the emergence of a curious public” which survived the Interregnum and helped create a public space that promoted the spirit of curiosity (257). After establishing these contexts, Picciotto turns to specific literary texts in part II. She “documents how the experimentalist effort to bring together thoughts and acts, words and things, influenced intellectuals who worked exclusively with words” as she digs deeper into the relationship between science and early modern literature (13). Chapter 5 further investigates how the lens became an inescapable metaphor in Restoration poetry and criticism in texts such as William Davenant’s Gondibert (1650), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), Andrew Marvell’s The Last Instructions to a Painter (1667), and John Dryden’s As Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668). Chapter 6, “Milton and the Paradizable Reader,” amply treats Milton. It is the penultimate chapter of Picciotto’s scholarship and is perhaps the most significant contribution to an already impressive project. She compares Milton to other experimentalists who “turned Bacon’s paradise of exercise and experiment into a working model for their own activities” and “restored the first man as a corporate producer of knowledge” (401). Thus, Picciotto argues that, for Milton, “the recovery of paradise and the reformation of public life were not separate things: to release paradise from its idolatrous identification with the first garden was to create the conditions for the emergence of a productive public” (401). Such was the project at work across all of Milton’s oeuvre. He “applied the...

Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies

Reviewed by: Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies Amy S. Rushton (bio) Jay, Paul. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010. In recent years, “transnational” has become a buzzword in the majority of humanities departments, particularly so in literature departments, with academics continuing to seek new ways of grouping disparate literatures, both to create courses and to categorize research that does not neatly fit into old historical or national models. Whilst postcolonial literature is now well assimilated into the British academy, this is not always the case elsewhere. Moreover, academics continue to query with the literature department’s tendency to label the work of any non-white, non-European writer as “postcolonial.” Such contentions that originally arose within postcolonial discourse are now frequently being voiced by the undergraduate student: what about those writers from second or even third generation immigrant families? Can we justify comparisons with Indian and African writing based on their shared colonial histories? What about writing in English that originates from outside Western publishing, such as China? Furthermore, the postcolonial pathway usually omits studies in American literature, thus forgoing any exploration into the wider relationships of African American writing to Africa, the Caribbean, and European diasporas, as well as an engagement with Latin American literature. “World” literature is a term that few academics are satisfied to be associated with, largely due to its sheer vagueness. Such concerns have opened up a space for the possibility of a transnational, literary framework: in a very general sense, transnational models of literary analysis allow a critic to compare texts from different areas of the globe, no longer restricted to geographical, national, or continental boundaries. In some ways, it is reminiscent of comparative literature, although the emphasis is not so much on translation. In terms of its appeal, Paul Jay argues that transnationalism has “productively complicated the nationalist paradigm” of literary studies, along with having “transformed the nature of the locations we study, and focused our attention on forms of cultural production that take place in the liminal spaces between real and imagined borders” (1). Yet despite its potential usefulness, transnationalism is by no means flawless and without controversy. With regards to literature, one of the more controversial elements of transnationalism is its perceived links to globalization theory, not necessarily a positive attribute in literary criticism, particularly for those schooled in postcolonialism. The term “globalization” invokes a threat of cultural homogenization, as well as a privileging of neo-liberal capitalism as the worldwide economic model. The influential postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha cautions against an unquestioning embrace of globalization, viewing it as an exclusive state of world-citizenship, one that is only open to the privileged few and conforms to a global, shared notion of free-market capitalism, usually exploiting poor citizens. It is these issues that Paul Jay addresses in Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Here, Jay proposes a transnational model for studying literature that is both informed by and critiques the theories of postcolonialism and globalization that have shaped its development. In fact, he argues that the two discourses have a “dialectical relationship with each other” and that any successful transnational model has to understand “the historical and the methodological relationship between them” (34). Jay is particularly interested in how theories of globalization have impacted both the creative writing process and academic interpretation of recent literature. The book is split into two distinct parts: the first, entitled “Globalization and the Study of Literature,” features four [End Page 299] chapters that introduce and clearly explain those areas of globalization that are relevant to his argument, addressing work by Arjun Appadurai, Kwame Appiah, Roland Robertson, Anthony Giddens, James Clifford, Paul Gilroy, and Edmundo O’Gorman, among others; the second section, “Globalization in Contemporary Literature,” focuses on how the conceptual issues outlined in the previous section are embodied within specific literary texts, exploring novels by Arundhati Roy, Vikram Chandra, Mohsin Hamid, Kiran Desai, Zakes Mda, Zadie Smith, and Junot Díaz. Global Matters is a highly engaging critical work that functions both as a survey of and an argument for the relationship between globalization theory and literary fiction. Although not intended as an...

Response to the Work of Rodolphe Gasché

the philosophical reach and acuity, and the literary sensitivity that we find in the work of Rodolphe Gasche. Gasche performs surgical gestures in his literary readings, deep interventions that open the literary field beyond its usual surfaces as established by literary history, thematic reading, or formal analysis. I want to emphasize the intensity indeed the seriousnessof Rodolphe Gasche's engagement with literature, one he presents as a counterpoint to his philosophical work. Gasche stands among the great literary critics who refuse to abandon the most fundamental questionshow does a literary work function, indeed what makes a literary work a literary work, what kind of work does it do, how does it do iteven as he engages with the fine art of reading specific literary texts and takes evident pleasure in their magic. Criticism today, it seems to me, is moving more and more away from this sort of ambitious inquiry; it is bracing to see such questions posed with intellectual rigor and urgency.

Cultural production and negotiation of borders: Introduction to the Dossier

The cultural production of borders can be as read as referring to part of the economy, as an aesthetic site of creativity and border negotiation, and a cultural factor in the bordering process. The need to understand these cultural dimensions of borders and borderlands has lead to interdisciplinary interest in narratives, aesthetic forms, and cultural memory. Border poetics and related forms of spatial poetics can provide fruitful approaches to specific literary texts, films and other artworks, as well as to bordering in general. This special dossier for the Journal of Borderlands Studies presents papers from the 2008 ABS European conference in Kirkenes, which had “Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders” as its theme and which brought together a wide range of researchers from both the social sciences and the humanities, raising questions about the role of culture in borderlands and also focusing on borders in Sub‐Arctic Europe. The following selection of papers addresses films, poetry, novels and cultural heritage connected to specific topographical borderlands.

A Victorian Study-Abroad Course for Undergraduates

Study-abroad opportunities are an important part of the undergradu ate experience at my university. Mor than half of our students take advan tage of one or more study-abroad programs before graduation. Almost all report that these experiences are among the most formative of their undergraduate years. In summer 2007, the English department launched a London program for English majors, and I was asked to take the first group. As I was conceiving the course I would teach, I knew I wanted to expose our majors to as many of London's Victorian resources as possible. My course plan called for each student to choose a particular decade in the nineteenth century, from which she must narrow down her research interests to a specific year and ultimately a specific literary text. (I ended up calling the course Literary London in the Long Nineteenth Century since I had eleven students enrolled and needed an extra decade!) I asked students to browse through two or three runs of periodicals for their chosen year and to follow up on their interests with other more traditional research sources. My goal was to instill a sense of?and hopefully a taste for? independent research by giving students the freedom to browse around, follow their instincts, and develop a project out of their own interests. Before the class began, I arranged for student access to the University of London's Senate House Library?chiefly for its open stacks ofVictorian periodi cals. The Senate House Library allows visitors to purchase short-term member ships at a reasonable price and was quite willing to negotiate an individual rate that allowed students reference access for the entire seven weeks of the course.

Die Tagtigers en die <i>Tydskrif vir letterkunde</i> – was daar 'n Tagtigerbeweging?

To identify a unique movement within the stream of literary works published in a decade of literary history, the historian of a literature should investigate the relationship between specific literary texts and the broader literary “industry” as well as their social context. The 1980s in South Africa (and in Afrikaans literature) were characterized by border wars, escalating political unrest and a state of emergency; in the literary world borders and barriers were being breached – between genres, in postmodern fashion, between old and new, in the writings of older and younger authors. This content and these trends were noticeable in the pages of the Tydskrif vir letterkunde , which served as a forum for new writing by established authors, and the debut of emerging young writers, among others Koos Prinsloo, Alexander Strachan and Etienne van Heerden. Their work reflected the revolutionary socio-political context, exploring also new pathways for the literary imagination. Manifestoes by Andre Letoit (a.k.a. Koos Kombuis) and Etienne van Heerden, published in the Tydskrif reflected new but divergent attitudes towards life and literature. Although one cannot deduce a coherent movement from these Tydskrif writings, they still present a panorama of singular activity in the Afrikaans literature of the 1980s. Keywords: Tydskrif vir letterkunde (journal), Tagtigers (Afrikaans writers of the 1980s), literary movements, Afrikaans literature Tydskrif vir Letterkunde • 43(1) • 2006: 57-67

THE POWER OF LITERATURE IN EFL CLASSROOMS

This paper proposes the importance of acknowledging literature as one of the best resources for promoting language learning in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms. It reviews briefly various theoretical issues in teaching English through literature. Highlights are given to the justifications and guidelines for literature in the language classroom. Finally, the article presents examples of practical teaching and learning tasks based on one specific literary text.

Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism by Laura Chrisman (review)

YES, 35, 2005 343 Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings ofRace,Imperialism andTransnationalism. By LAURA CHRISMAN. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2003. viii + 200 pp. ?I4.99. ISBN:0-7190-5828-7. LauraChrismanco-edited one of the three majoranthologiesof postcolonialtheory that appeared in I993-94; like the other two, hers was influentialin the formation of the field of study. In Postcolonial Contraventions she brings together versions of her essays and reviews previouslypublished over the last nine years, arguing that the practice of critique sustains productive debate and constant re-assessment of a developing academic area. She welcomes what she perceives as a recent shift towards increasinglymaterialistand historicistanalysisin postcolonial theory. Her essaysare groupedinto three sections,Imperialism,Transnationalismand race, and Postcolonial theoretical politics, but the thematic trajectoriesare not integrated. Readers are most likely to use the book as a stimulusfor engaging with the issues and theorists that are addressed in individual chapters. The fact that there is no concluding chapter implicitlyacknowledgesthat this is the case. The most coherent section is the first, which engages with such theorists as Cesaire, McClintock, and Said through close readings of specific literary texts. Chrisman's brilliant analysis of the relationship between the metropolis and the colony in HeartofDarkness is used to explore the significanceof Cesaire'sformulation , the 'boomerang effect' of imperialism. A similarly subtle analysis of King Solomon's Minesdefines Haggard's ideology as 'historicallycontingent, variable and even contradictory' (p. 46). The dialogic response is lucid, and encourages the reader to engage with the source as well as the critique in a dialogue of her own. The stimulating essay on empire's culture in Jameson, Said and Spivak argues productively,using the example of Mansfield Park,for 'a model of culturalrepresentation that permits of [...] internal ideological contradiction and contestation' (p. 67). Other parts of the book are likely to be less accessible to the student readers targetedin the blurb. One chapteris a review firstpublishedin I997 of a reviewby Robert Young published in 1996 of Spivak's Outsidein the Teaching Machine;its argumentis cogent but, here and elsewhere,there is a hint that the writer'scensure of othersfor departingfrom 'rigorouslyacademic modes of operation'(p. I41) might profitablybe applied to her own work, as when she expressesreluctanceto criticize the work of Benita Parry, 'my fave rave' (p. I71). In the final chapter the critique implicit in the coy reference to 'the discourseword', and Chrisman'scomment, 'I certainly applaud the departure of the discourse word' (p. I7I) is presented as a given, with no analysisof the discrepancybetween this and the title of Chrisman's I993 anthology. The sequence of chapters in the third part gestures towards an intellectualautobiography;the shift in tone from one chapter to another is disconcerting . In a rathermagisterialpiece the reader,addressedas 'you', is positioned as a nascent South Africanculturalcritic;in anotherthe implicationsof Achebe's Home andExileare teased out incisively,enabling the readerto place subsequentdevelopments , such as Niall Ferguson'srevisionisthistory of empire, within the prophetic framework. The book's emphasison alertreadinginvitescritique.One chapterfocuseson the role of blurb-writersin facilitating'the ideological production of national cultures' (p. 120). The book's own blurb refers to Chrisman's 'important new paradigms for 344 Reviews understanding [...] Englishness' yet nowhere in the text is a distinction made between Englishnessand Britishness,indeed the index treatsthem as interchangeable ('see also Englishness'appears under 'Britishness'and vice versa). The blurb opens misleadingly with a line that attributes Williams and Chrisman's I993 anthology solely to Chrisman. One might also question the inclusion of a chapter on culturalstudiesin South Africa in which the 'new' country appearsas distinctly yesterday's news. The chapter was published in 1996 and focuses on a 'recent' articlethat appearedin I992. And so the book'spolemical styleinvitesan interrogative response. UNIVERSITYOF STIRLING ANGELA SMITH Thresholds of Western Culture: Identity, Postcoloniality, Transnationalism. Ed. byJOHN BRR FOSTER JR and WAYNEJ. FROMAN. New York and London: Continuum. 2002. 275 PP. ?65 (pbk?25). ISBN 0-8264-5999-4 (pbk0-8264-6001-I). Between Philosophy andPoetry:Writing, Rhythm, History.Ed. by MASSIMO VERDICCHIO and ROBERT BURCH.New York and London: Continuum Books 2002. 223 pp. ?65 (pbk?19.99). ISBN 0-8264-6005-4, (pbk0-8264-6006-2). ExtremeBeauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death. Ed. by JAMEs SWEARINGEN...

“Thou, The Player of the Game, Art God”: Nabokovian Game-playing in Cronenberg’s eXistenZ

David Cronenberg a souvent parlé de l'influence marquante que Vladimir Nabokov a exercé sur son oeuvre. Une analyse de certains passages des textes de Nabokov peut donc élucider plusieurs aspects de l'esthétique littéraire qu'incarne le cinéma de Cronenberg, en particulier son film eXistenZ. Le cinéma de Cronenberg partage de nombreux éléments stylistiques avec les textes de Nabokov, entre autres, les intrusions de l'auteur, les motifs ludiques, la mise-en-abîme, l'acte de nommer et les structures narratives « auto-consumantes ».

Signs of Science: Literature, Science, and Spanish Modernity since 1868

Signs of Science: Literature, Science, and Spanish Modernity since 1868 traces how Spanish culture represented scientific activity from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The book combines the global perspective afforded by historical narrative with detailed rhetorical analyses of images of science in specific literary and scientific texts. As literary criticism it seeks to illuminate similarities and differences in how science and scientists are pictured; as cultural history it follows the course of a centuries-long dialogue about Spain and science.

Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature

Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. By Jill Robbins. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1999. xxiv + 185 pp. $42; 33.50 [pounds sterling] (paperbound $16; 12.75 [pounds sterling]). The amount, range, and variety of work on Levinas and literary theory and criticism is steadily increasing. Jill Robbins's book is a substantial and important addition to the field, but also expresses a certain reservation. Robert Eaglestone's Ethical Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997) addressed the possibility of a Levinasian criticism. By contrast, my own Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (London: Routledge; 1999) sought to connect Levinas up with contemporary theorists to produce a set of ethical readings of specific literary texts. Robbins is principally concerned with Levinas's own accounts of literature. But as she herself says, this is immediately problematic and a summons to caution. For Levinas, ethics and literature or literary criticism were incommensurable. He wrote only rarely of literature, and the place it occupies in his ethical philosophy is generally a negative one. His essays on particular writers are few. If Robbins is concerned with `altered reading' (and the significance of her title is not altogether clear) one of the `alterations' apparently implied is that we should keep Levinas and literature largely apart. Finding herself boxed into this corner, Robbins engages in a series of deft and skilful manoeuvres. The book falls into two parts. The first, which is in many ways the better of the two, consists of a scrupulous, meditative, subtle account of Levinasian ethics. Robbins is consistently attentive to the double-binds and paradoxes of Levinasian logic. But what emerges none the less is how concerned Levinas was to emphasize what he took to be the irresponsibility of art, even its monstrosity, as both a parasite on and a caricature of life. To some extent, at least, this is clearly a Jewish survivor's indignant rebuke to existential aesthetics as the latter were emerging in postwar France, and Robbins might have noted this. But her feeling for Levinas's deep distrust of the aesthetic realm, and her pursuit of the ethical arguments that stem from it, are precise and accurate. In the second half of the book, however, she turns rather to the question of how far Levinas's anti-aesthetic position can be unpicked at the edges. …

Questioning Interdisciplinarity: Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, and Literary Criticism

Cognitive science and evolutionary psychology show great potential as explanatory paradigms for a wide array of cultural products and activities,including literature. In some scholars' minds these two fields are emerging as the cornerstones of a major “new interdisciplinarity” that may well displace the relativistic interpretive paradigms that have dominated the humanities for the last few decades. Through a review of a number of recently published works, I assess the situation of these two fields in relation to the specific, currently reigning approaches to literary study as well as in relation to more general issues of academic literary interpretation. What do we have so far, and what can we possibly expect these essentially empirical-scientific disciplines to add to literary criticism? If cognitive science and evolutionary psychology are to become important in a truly interdisciplinary sense, then what kinds of claims will they need to make?Most important, how will the problematic but unavoidable distinction between nature and nurture be dealt with? Though the kinds of explanations offered in both fields can obviously enough be relevant to defining whatliterature is in relation to the human organism, how will the same kinds of explanations be involved in the actual interpretation of specific literary texts? For only an approach that provides new interpretive possibilities of actual texts can succeed on any broad level. After considering examples of current interdisciplinary work that, regardless of their other strengths, do not turn out to be significantly new and differ-ent from previous paradigms, I consider an example that, to my mind, most strongly illustrates in a general way what the new interdisciplinarity will have to look like if it is going to succeed.

The trials of James Cotter and Henry, Baron Barry of Santry: two case studies in the administration of criminal justice in early eighteenth-century Ireland

At least twice during the first half of the eighteenth century criminal prosecutions were undertaken in Ireland which gripped the public imagination. The first of these celebrated cases, involving the trial for rape, conviction and subsequent execution of the Cork Jacobite James Cotter in 1720, has also come to hold an extraordinary fascination for historians of eighteenth-century Ireland. Few writers concerned with early Georgian Ireland have been able to avoid its allure. For the most part, however, the incident has been referred to only fleetingly, employed variously as a motif of religious or political conflict or ethnic alienation. For Kevin Whelan, it is illustrative of the ‘conflict between old and new families’ in Munster, and indicative of a ‘partisan popish paranoia’ on the part of the province’s Protestant rulers. For Louis Cullen, it was ‘part of the legacy of the 1690s’, yet an event which would provide ‘the spark which set alight the sectarian tensions in Munster in the 1760s’. Other commentators have seen the case as one in which ‘a trumped-up charge’ was laid, for political purposes, against a man ‘generally believed’ to be innocent. A few have offered more guarded conclusions. Thomas Bartlett ventures only that this was ‘certainly a sensational event’. James Kelly both recognises the unique circumstances of Cotter’s case and suggests that it is ‘unlikely that he was the victim of judicial assassination’. S. J. Connolly goes further, stressing that Cotter had ‘quite clearly been guilty of rape’. However, the fullest and most recent examination of the case, in an essay written by Breandán Ó Buachalla in an ‘attempt to correlate a specific literary text to the career of a specific political activist’, returns us firmly to the recurrent context of Catholic Jacobite resistance and Protestant collusion.

Only When I Laugh: Textual Dynamics of Ethnic Humor

I must confess: I have been doing something one is not supposed to do in polite circles -- I have been trading ethnic jokes. Not nasty, mean-spirited attacks, I hasten to add, but ethnic jokes nonetheless, jokes dependent to some extent on assumptions and stereotypes about a wide variety of ethnic groups. This activity might seem fairly suspect among my socially and politically progressive colleagues and friends, yet my confession is not nearly as shocking as my discovery: ethnic jokes can not only be not offensive or bigoted, they can serve as an important strategy for defining ethnicity positively. They can provide a welcome means for asserting pride in one's ethnic identity, rather than serving merely to demean those who are marked as ethnically Other. While writing this article, I found that almost anyone to whom I mentioned the topic freely offered a or two for my research. On one occasion, an entire dinner party engaged in a cycle.(1) Each person contributed the answer specific to their ethnic group to the joking question of what constitutes sexual foreplay: You're writing on ethnic jokes? Like, what's the Italian form of foreplay?' an Italian-American friend inquired. What? In a dialect more Flatbush than Florence, she replied, Yo, Baby, get ovah heah! Not to be outdone, her Irish-American boyfriend chimed in, Well, you know the Irish form of foreplay -- a six-pack. Never having heard these versions, I told the only foreplay I knew, the one about my own group. And then there's the Jewish form of foreplay -- two hours of begging. The jokes themselves provided a discourse within, yet disparate from, the rest of the conversation, as the single act of telling spontaneously grew into a joking discourse. Each ethnic speaker told a decidedly American ethnic joke. The Brooklyn accent indicated an Italian-American; a true Dubliner would be drinking a pint of Guinness, not a six-pack; the stereotype of frigid Jewish women is linked to the caricature of the Jewish-American Princess. Thus, each participant in the joking discourse identified with an ethnic heritage that was inseparable from her/his American nationality. The fact that each participant was eager to have her/his group represented in the cycle indicates that these jokes, although founded on seemingly derogatory stereotypes, served as an expression of pride in one's ethnicity and an example of the desire to share that ethnic pride with individuals from other backgrounds. This article explores the impulse to use ethnic as a vehicle for the assertion of a positive ethnic identity. In Theories of Ethnic Humor: How to Enter, Laughing, John Lowe argues that literary scholars dealing with ethnic in American look outside their discipline to find important tools and strategies for their analyses. By incorporating the work of folklorists, anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, and psychologists into literary studies, critics can achieve a greater understanding of how the dynamics of ethnic shape (Lowe 451-56). Although this essay is intended to contribute to the interdisciplinary, cross-cultural theory of ethnic humor which Lowe suggests is needed (455) and includes several sources from outside literary studies, my approach here will largely invert the process he outlines. Rather than exploring literary representations of ethnic through interdisciplinary analysis, I will use literary theory to explore individual joke texts in order to trace a broader phenomenon: the strategy through which ethnic speakers celebrate identity by telling jokes about their own ethnic group. While I am not addressing within specific literary texts, I hope that my work here will serve as a building block for future projects that deal more specifically with literature in the traditional sense. The question of what constitutes a literary text has dominated twentieth century literary criticism. …

War in Goethe's Writings: Representation and Assessment

This study expands the body of knowledge on Goethe's understanding of war by linking his particular portrayals of war to larger intellectual and aesthetic concerns, including the nature of individual development, the organization of human society, the efficacy of human activity, and the impact of transcendent forces. Based on the analytical techniques developed by Frenzel, Luthi, Ziolkowski and Daemmrich, it provides an amplification of earlier, exclusively historical analyses, through a consideration of the thematic dynamics of specific literary texts. This work delineates Goethe's philosophical position on war and illuminates the forms of its representation. It should be of interest to Goethe scholars, those engaged in motif studies, and in peace studies.

Naming the Rose: Readers and Codes in Umberto Eco's Novel

Umberto Eco's theory of semiotics has taken an evolutionary path of development. A Theory of Semiotics, first English edition of Eco's semiotics theory, was a detailed explanation of his theory of signs.1 major criticism of this work, a lack of references to specific literary texts to elucidate theory, led to Role of Reader.2 This book repeated theoretical basis of first book, but it also included a major section of specific literary texts such as Sue's Les mysteres de Paris and Allais's Un drame bien parisien. Eco reaches most recent stage of his theoretical work with Name of Rose, a novel which was published in Italy in 1980 and translated into English in 1983.3 In this novel, as one critic suggests, Eco has moved from theory to semiotic fiction.4 As Eco himself says in closing line of his introduction to Role of Reader: [a]fter having to let semiotics speak abundantly about texts, it is correct to let a text speak by itself about its strategy (RR, 40). In The Theory of Signs and Role of Eco explains evolution of semiotics during past twenty years.5 During sixties, semiotics focused on theoretical foundation of signs or sign-tradition. During seventies, there occurred a violent shift from signs to texts; emphasis in theory shifted from considering what constituted a sign to formation of text. third stage (from end of seventies to present) does not center on generation of texts but their reading. Eco believes that current theory is concerned with the recognition of reader's response as a possibility built into textual strategy (TS, 35). According to Eco, reader plays an active role in textual interpretation because signs are constructed according to an inferential model. . Signs are beginning of a process that leads a reader to an series of progressive consequences (TS, 44) and are devices that evoke meaning for reader. This open quality of signs postulates an active role on part of their interpreter (TS, 45). By defining this vital theory of signs as moving reader to an infinite number of possibilities for interpreting a text, Eco argues that semiotics has moved beyond simply listing elaborate patterns for understanding signs and texts (a frequent criticism of theories) to importance of reader in understanding signs found in text. In Role of Reader Eco identifies possible reader as Reader, who deals interpretatively with codes within a text just as author deals generatively with codes. Model Reader and author thus co

Gin Lane in the Bowery: Crane's Maggie and William Hogarth

MAGGIE is a tease. For decades now, literary historians and LYE.. Crane scholars have attempted to ascertain the sources of this painful rendering of late nineteenth-century Bowery slum life, but the results have been far from conclusive. One school of Maggie source-hunters has assumed the literary approach, arguing that Crane drew his inspiration from Flaubert's Madame Bovary, from Zola's L'Assommoir, from such contemporary works as the Rev. Thomas DeWitt Talmage's Night Sides of City Life, or even from Kipling's Light That Failed.' There is some basis for all of these suggestions; but the fact remains that Crane was unusually ill-read,2 and any attempt to proffer a specific literary text as the source of the content or technique of any Crane work must take this into account. This caveat is especially prominent in the commentaries of the other school of Maggie source-hunters, those who assume the painterly approach. Drawing upon the incontrovertible facts that Crane's sister Mary Helen was a practicing artist and art instructor; that one of Crane's early loves (approximately i 888 to I 892) was Phebe English, a professional painter; that Crane lived in the studios of several New York illustrators in the i 8gos; and that several of his writings-including Third Violet, The Silver Pageant, and