Subversive Texts Research Articles

Esquisse d’une réception critique de l’œuvre d’Hervé Guibert en deux moments: 1990/2001

Initially confidential, Hervé Guibert’s work was revealed to the general public with the publication of À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie in 1990. The confession of his illness and the indiscretions about Michel Foucault’s life made the writer a media phenomenon, and there were few literary pages in French and French-speaking weeklies and dailies that did not report on this novel. However, the treatment of the novel in the newspapers goes beyond the simple literary debate and is crossed by moral and ethical considerations. More than ten years later, in 2001, Le Mausolée des amants, the writer’s diary, appeared posthumously. This shorter media period, circumscribed to this single publication, really gives us a purely critical view, detached from the emotional impact of the author’s illness and imminent death. A more distant view, therefore, but also, perhaps, more accurate in that it focuses more on the work of an author than on the author of a work. It is these two periods of reception of Hervé Guibert’s work that the present article wishes to examine, in order to study the way in which critics seize upon subversive texts that destabilise the bourgeois order and the political correctness.

포스트 코로나 시대의 국내 영문학교육: 트릴링의 문학교육관을 중심으로

This paper tries to apply Lionel Trilling’s liberal views on literary education, which characterize his later thought, to the practice of English literary teaching in higher education in the post-Covid Korean society. Trilling argues that literary teachers must help (undergraduate) students dialectically form their own selves through and against the subversive modernist texts. The reading of literary text, especially that of the novels, contributes to the formation of an autonomous self by cultivating moral realism, liberal imagination and egalitarian and pluralistic fellow-feeling that is required in democratic society. This formation of an autonomous self has a vital importance in that it is linked to the formation of autonomous individual selves equipped with realism, flexibility, respect for diversity and democratic fellow-feeling in this post-Covid society rapidly polarizing into individual selfishness and collective madness. Likewise, teachers of English literature in higher education of today can contribute to the formation of autonomous individual selves compatible with the modern liberal society by fully foregrounding the subversiveness of social constructivism in critical theories, encouraging and respecting the students’ own judgment resulting from their wrestling with those subversive texts and directing their attention, especially in their teaching of the novels, to the protagonist’s struggle and fortitude, to the characters’ moral judgments and different, autonomous and equivalent fates.

An aesthetic of (re)appropriation: Remediating practices as history and identity in LA Rebellion film and hip hop sampling

This article examines remediation practices as forms of Black creativity in films associated with the ‘LA Rebellion’ and in hip hop from its first two decades. As used here, remediation has two meanings. It stands for the use of prior media in subsequent works, be it the file footage incorporated by the UCLA-based filmmakers of the ‘LA Rebellion’ (the name given to Black filmmakers who studied and produced films between the late 1960s and 1980s), or the use of sampling and turntable-manipulated breakbeats that defines early hip hop. However, remediation is also used here for its potential as a corrective. Although postmodernity’s pastiche is discernible in the remediated elements of texts associated with these separate but contemporaneous movements, there is something specifically Black in the freely appropriated and repurposed prior creative work towards transformative ends. Beyond any postmodern effect, these practices reflect specific ideas related to politics, revolution and counter-ideological impulses opposed to the dominant white culture that surrounded these artists, and to which their texts respond. This transformative reuse – visual or aural – expresses what Foucault termed ‘counter-history’ and ‘counter-memory’ – revealing subversive texts that complicate and challenge white cultural and historical hegemony.

Agency, Adaptation, and Audience: Re-visioning the Legend of Mahsuri in Selected Contemporary Malaysian Young Adult Fiction

The legend of Mahsuri is inseparable from the historical and cultural identity of the people of Langkawi, Kedah. Despite its graphic depiction of mob violence and brutality, and perhaps even because of it, the legend transmitted through the folktale, retains its hold on the collective memory of many Malaysians. As the oldest and most widely known form of literature for children, the folktale reflects the concerns of a “monarchistic, patriarchal, and feudal society” and its attendant limitations (Zipes 8). Yet folktales are also among the most subversive texts in children’s literature, and often “support the rights of disadvantaged members of the population – children, women, and the poor – against the establishment” (Lurie 16). In acknowledging the interrogative power of the folktale, especially its ability to challenge the ideological position of the Malay woman as constructed by dominant interests, this essay argues that the legendary story of Mahsuri, as well as its subsequent adaptations, provides important insights into the contemporary relevance of the folktale to the contestation of the patriarchal, feudalistic, and nationalistic discourses circulating in modern, multicultural Malaysia. This essay discusses two contemporary textual representations of the Mahsuri legend – Lee Su Ann’s young adult murder mystery, The Curse (2005), and Preeta Samarasan’s short story of interracial love, “Mahsuri” (2011) – in order to illustrate how each draws attention to the subjugated status of women in contemporary Malay society. As riveting examples of Malaysian young adult fiction, both stories reflect the critical engagement with, and interrogation of, issues of gender, racial, and religious identity in contemporary multicultural Malaysia by foregrounding the struggle for power and possession over the body of the idealized Malay woman and through their mutual emphasis on the repercussions of Mahsuri’s “curse” on their protagonists.

Understanding the ways missing and murdered Indigenous women are framed and handled by social media users

The media plays a large role in facilitating negative racial and gender ideologies about Indigenous women. In Canada, as we struggle with the national crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW), researchers have collected data from social media (SM) and identified that subversive texts about Indigenous women perpetuate a racialized violent discourse. Given that many Indigenous peoples, including Indigenous youth, have smart phones and/or other ways to access SM they too are exposed to the discourse that subjugates, vilifies and dehumanizes Indigenous women, many of whom are family or community members. Our research investigates the messages shared on #MMIW and identifies a reframing by hashtag users. The results assist in understanding how SM plays a role in perpetuating stereotypes about Indigenous peoples but also how SM can be used to mitigate those messages.

Publishing Subversive Texts in Elizabethan England and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, edited by Teresa Bela, Clarinda Calma, Jolanta Rzegocka

Publishing Subversive Texts in Elizabethan England and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, edited by Teresa Bela, Clarinda Calma, Jolanta Rzegocka

The death of the stereotype: Reclaim of self in Angela Carter’s “The Loves of Lady Purple”

Women have almost always been depicted stereotypically in literary history. Female characters have been presented acting in accordance with the pre-determined and recursive roles casted for them. In relation to this, female is pictured as either too good or too evil lacking a significant individualism and complexity. Accordingly, literary history has revolved around such stereotypes as “damsel in distress,” “angel in the house,” or “ femme fatale ” in the construction of its female characters. Nevertheless, there is a strong and noteworthy contestation against such stereotypical appropriations of women in literature especially within feminist context. Indeed, such female characters negate stereotypical representations, and surpass cliche scenarios envisioned for them in exceedingly subversive texts. “The Loves of Lady Purple” by Angela Carter, for instance, is a story that simultaneously relies on and subverts the female stereotype, femme fatale , which stands for the overtly seductive, abusive, and destructive female. Even though the story enacts a femme fatale , the characterization of the stereotype serves not to promote but to problematize stereotypical representations of female in the overtly male-centered literary canon. The femme fatale depicted in the story inclines to subvert the stereotypical traits imposed upon her by utilizing the very characteristics the stereotype would substantially demand. To this end, this paper specifically analyzes the representation and re-representation of the femme fatale in “The Loves of Lady Purple,” and it aims to lay bare how femme fatale dismantles her objectification, suppression, and configuration by the male, and reclaims her own self.

English

It is on the tradition of the postmodern and magical realist texts to be in the business of liberating from conventions and established norms and blurring the borders. The way in which these subversive texts challenge the traditionally accepted codes and regulations is directly allied to Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque through which the firmly established hierarchical laws of the society are inverted. The paper convincingly argues how Carter’s fiction, an influential paradigm of magical realism, erodes the boundaries of the paradoxical impulses and celebrates the confusion of the categories through incorporating the theories of carnivalisation. It suggests the ways in which carnivalesque operates to open the possibilities to construct a de-hierarchized world which is deprived of privileged sectors, patriarchal authority and any form of supremacy and is filled with the primacy of marginality. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3L-2014-2002-12 Key words: carnivalesque; patriarchy; subversion; authority; hierarchy

Depicting the absurdity of war: Israeli human-interest reportage of combat reality as subversive texts (1969–1992)

ABSTRACTThis article explores the important role played by Israeli television's human-interest war reportage in challenging the Israeli hegemonic heroic ethos between 1968 and 1993, when Israel's state television station held a monopoly of the airwaves. By depicting the absurdity of the conflicts in question and implying political responsibility for the mutual suffering of the protagonists and their enemies, documentary human-interest reports contributed to the heated political debate in Israeli society over the legitimacy of these violent conflicts. This contribution was possible due to the sophisticated utilization of cinematic methods that created complex texts, which challenged the Israeli hegemonic discourse of war.

The Difficulty of Reading Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish" Suspiciously

The difficulty of reading Allen Ginsberg’s poetry is a recurring theme in criticism of his work and that of other post-WWII “Beat Generation” writers. “Even when a concerted effort is made to illuminate [Beat] literature,” laments Nancy M. Grace, “doing so is difficult: the romance of the Beat life threatens to subsume the project” (812). Of course, the Beat life is romantic to the extent that it is romantically regaled. Continual romantic portrayals, such as that of Ginsberg in the recent movie Howl (2010), rekindle the Beat romance for new audiences with chicken-and-egg circularity. I explore this difficulty of reading Ginsberg that Grace and other critics identify by articulating it with respect to "Kaddish"—“Ginsberg’s most highly praised and his least typical poem” (Perloff 213)—as a difficulty of interpreting Ginsberg suspiciously. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s theories of interpretation—or “hermeneutics”—provide the theoretical foundation here. Ricoeur distinguishes between a romantic or “restorative” mode of interpretation, where meaning is reverently reconciled to a text assumed to be trustworthy, and a “suspicious” approach, where meaning is aggressively extrapolated from a text held as unreliable. In order to bring these theories to bear on "Kaddish" and its criticism, I draw on Rita Felski’s pioneering work in relating Ricoeur’s concept of “suspicious reading” to the field of literature. Is it possible to read "Kaddish" suspiciously? Or is there nothing left for suspicious readers to expose in texts such as "Kaddish" that are already self-exposing?

Allegory, blending, and censorship in modern literature

Abstract I argue that politically subversive texts written in allegorical form attain their significance because they are conceptual blends. Political allegories allow writers to criticise regimes indirectly since writers can count on readers to mentally contruct appropriate blends. Readers are naturally driven to find new values that fit an allegory's fixed roles, often yielding new meaning for texts in different contexts. Unfortunately, politically subversive allegories may be censored when censors run the same blends. The three main texts discussed here – Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog, Orwell's Animal Farm, and Miller's The Crucible – are often interpreted as political allegories. I turn to conceptual blending theory to show in some detail how those readings arise. When it comes to allegory and censorship, I suggest that conceptual blending theory can offer us new insights into these timeless topics.

Sub-Version: Weiblichkeitsentwurfe in den Erzahltexten Lou Andreas-Salomes

Wernz, Birgit. Sub-version: Weiblichkeitsentwurfe in den Erzdhlteten Lou AndreasSalomes . Pfaffenweiler. Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1997. 202pp. Birgit Wernz's monograph on Lou Andreas-Salome's literary work is inspired by constructivist theories of femininity that give new perspectives on Salome's texts and biography. Influenced primarily by Judith Butler, Wernz contends that Salome's literary work anticipated deconstructionist textual strategies such as irony, parody, and mimetic variation, aesthetic features that unsettle dominant discourses on femininity. Wernz's approach to Salome's work intends to function as a corrective to the prevailing Salome scholarship that criticizes her body of work for its generally conventional stance on and femininity. In her first chapter, 'Post'-Feminismus als Methode, Wernz outlines the usefulness of constructivist theories of the subject for her work. Arguing for an historical approach to the category of the feminine as a relational and a functional, as opposed to an essential, category, Wernz relies heavily on Butler's Gender Trouble to show that politically subversive texts need not create counter-images of strong women, but rather can use mimetic strategies as a way to expose gender categories as confining and arbitrary. The historical dimension of the book is addressed in the second chapter. In it Wernz depicts turn-of-the-century discursive formations of the focusing on the psychoanalytical metaphor of the woman as mystery. After a somewhat narrowly focused discussion of historical formations of femininity, she gives a cursory overview of their subversion in literature by writers at the turn of the century. Finally, Wernz leads us into a discussion of Salome's texts as they define the feminine, a definition constructed in dialogue with female contemporaries active in the women's movement. The subsequent chapters discuss Salome texts, beginning with her essays on Ibsen's female characters and moving on to Salome's own works of short fiction and ending with a discussion of her collection of stories, Menschenkinder. Salome's early work on Ibsen's female characters shows her evolving analytical/literary interest in the psychology of in the context of heterosexual love and marriage. Wernz asserts that the Ibsen essays cross genre borders between fiction and theory and thus can be seen as a precursor to her own literary treatment of the themes of women and love. In her Ibsen essays, Salome discusses the various subject positions accorded to the female characters and renders the various ways that they internalize, subvert, or otherwise react to being held captive by love and marriage. A discussion of three Salome stories makes up the next three chapters. Each story represents, in Wernz's view, a deconstruction of the dominant ideology of femininity (via subverting the masculine/feminine binarism) without portraying a counter-image of an emancipated female character. …

"The Black Dick": Race, Sexuality, and Discourse in the L.A. Novels of Walter Mosley

streets were dark with something more than night. (Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder 13) Black narrative writing in America often employs a detective-like protagonist struggling against an evil society - as Theodore O. Mason, Jr., points out (182) - yet, curiously, detective fiction itself is a genre that has attracted few writers (most notably, in decades past, Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes). In Mosley's four L.A. detective novels, he joins small cohort of detective fiction writers, apparently as part of a radical project to enter mostly white, male, and conservative populist terrain of American detective fiction. At same time, however, Mosley's often uncritical use of traditional hard-boiled detective formula seems to work against this project by employing a detective narrator in a previously invisible textual location - Los Angeles. Indeed, there is a tension between Mosley's subject and his method, and this tension prompts my basic question about Mosley's L.A. novels: Are they - with use of a narrator, characters, and locations - authentically transgressive texts, or are they discursively subsumed under detective story formula (and especially L.A. detective fiction paradigm, as constructed by Chandler) and do they come, thus, to represent at best nostalgic traces of hardboiled tradition? In other words, are novels merely exotic versions of American detective story, as opposed to subversive texts? My answer to these questions is an Ellisonian yes and no. In terms of use of characters and locations - and also in terms of generic violations of hardboiled detective story - Mosley's novels indeed function as texts of difference. Yet when they deploy Chandlerian hardboiled detective and ultimately embrace essentially conservative thematics of L.A. detective story, Mosley's novels mute subversiveness and reinforce reassuring quality of formulaic detective fiction. In this light, I will read Mosley's novels as metacritical allegories that reflect a fundamental ambivalence about his own intervention into white (detective) discourse. Two recent essays on detective fiction decisively argue in favor of a discursive difference in texts like Mosley's L.A. novels. In Chandler Comes to Harlem: Racial Politics in Thrillers of Chester Himes, Peter J. Rabinowitz argues that Himes could not just imitate hardboiled novels and, as Himes claims, simply make the face black in his detective novels. Instead, Rabinowitz insists, Chandlerian notion of a self-contained integrity and noir heroism is unavailable to Himes's detectives inasmuch as their situation . . . is inextricably tied up in racial politics (22).(1) In another essay, Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins: Detective and Afro-American Fiction, Theodore O. Mason, Jr., similarly argues that, despite his use of detective genre, Mosley breaks with traditional white detective story through oppositional use of subject matter. Even more, Mason contends that Easy Rawlins discovers inadequacy of assumed cultural knowledge - especially about race and sexuality - in construction of self in a racist and sexist society, and thus joins other protagonists (like Milkman in Morrison's Song of Solomon and Papa LaBas in Reed's Mumbo Jumbo) who similarly recognize constructed nature of identity in a racist society. Although Rabinowitz and Mason offer strong arguments in favor of a transgressive detective fiction, both ultimately tell only part of story, for they ignore way in which story and detective in Himes's and Mosley's novels reflect traditional hardboiled detective fiction. Despite Mosley's counter-discursive deployment of a protagonist, his L.A. detective novels reinforce conservative values of traditional American detective fiction. While (as in Chandler) Mosley's Rawlins moves through a world in which white politicians, businessmen, and cops - as well as community leaders - are all corrupt, his novels never put the law itself . …

La littérature saisie par l'histoire

Literature in the grip of history The present article is not a study of the "Nouveau Roman", but rather a reflection on the conditions necessary for the break in French esthetics in the late 1950s. The new avenues opened up by the history of publishing and a sociological approach concerned with the production of symbolic goods authorize a rethinking of publishers' choices, which ensured the promotion of this literary movement. The Nouveau Roman has become inseparable from the Editions de Minuit. But this was not a forgone conclusion : the Editions du Seuil, who published Jean Cayrol, the first theoretician of the "Lazarist novel" (i.e. literature of redemption through suffering), should have been the logical ones to promote this avant-garde movement. Initially, unwilling to shoulder the costs of an avant-garde editorial strategy, Le Seuil, via Roland Barthes, helped the Editions de Minuit launch a new esthetic of the novel : Alain Robbe-Grillet became Jean Cayrol's natural successor. This aberrant succession - due to the recent past, the war (Cayrol had fought in the Resistance and been deported ; Robbe-Grillet, a follower of Marshal Petain, had done his stint at volunteer labor in Germany) -was made possible by the Editions de Minuit. How is it imaginable that one of the most public authors, the de facto if not official literary director of the publishing house born of the Resistance, could be "on the other side". From this standpoint it is not so much at the thematic level that one needs to think the all-important relationship between the Nouveau Roman and the War but at the level of its writing and its place of publication. The second crucial repercussion the Editions de Minuit had on the Nouveau Roman's accession to avant-garde status was their stand against the war in Algeria. For the break with current esthetics embodied by the Nouveau Roman to appear, Minuit had to come into conflict with the master of the hour, Jean-Paul Sartre and the dominant literary trend of the moment : "litterature engagée". By publishing subversive texts on the Algerian war at the same time as it was bringing out "pure literature", the Nouveau Roman, the Editions de Minuit managed to dissociate literature and politics. Their political commitment reminiscent of the "Dreyfus Affair" together with their disqualification of "engaged literature" helped bolster intellectuals' break with the Communist Party, but it also bore the seeds of another radical change : since Emile Zola, the intellectual had been inseparable from the man of letters ; with the writer dethroned, who was now going to embody the figure of the intellectual?

"Looking About Me With All My Eyes": Censored Viewing, Carnival, and Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches

MARY CAPPELLO "Looking About Me With All My Eyes": Censored Viewing, Carnival, and Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches I. IN THE EXAMINING ROOM t least since Foucault, the scene of institutionalized medi- „cine has served as an obvious locale for studying looking relations and the reproduction, management, and censorship of bodies. In contemporary Western medical practice increasingly sophisticated imaging apparati fetishize the technologized reproduction of a body's inner landscape (which, in turn, remains eminently un-readable by the "body" being imaged), and have profound effects on what actions are taken on people's lives.1 The precedent for the primacy of the specular, the confluence ofphotography with diagnostic discourse and the amphitheatrical space of medical pedagogy, is already apparent in the United States in the nineteenth century. The Civil War as both the real and fantasmatic catalyst for the professionalization of medicine created the need for nurses and hospitals, and fed the fascination for photographic record of the body mutilated beyond repair. Louisa May Alcott, better known today for her wildly successful sentimental narratives and more recently discovered Gothic thrillers, began her writing career with a series of sketches loosely based on her experiences as a nurse during the Civil War. Hospital Sketches is a ready site for examining gender and race in the realm of censored viewing.2 Arizona Quarterly Volume 50, Number 3, Autumn 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board ofRegents ISSN 0004-161o 6oMary Cappella Alcott was a tireless writer, driven, it seems, by both artistic desire and practical necessity. Her father, the famous but failed transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, epitomized that "-ism'"s aversion to utility and the "material world" by forcing Louisa May Alcott to become, luckily for us, the primary financial support of the Alcott family. Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern have made invaluable contributions to Alcott studies by unearthing the diversity ofmaterials to which her circumstances gave rise, but critics still, by and large, tend to use their findings to chart a double-voiced-ness in Alcott's work: they find an Alcott who, on the one hand, panders to public demand and on the other exposes qualities of her world in ways that could only be considered radical. Well-intentioned as critics might be in their desire to acknowledge Alcott's own critical powers, they risk reducing the multidimensional weave ofAlcott's or any writer's design when they describe Litde Women and its serialized kin as conformist, and Alcott's pseudonymous productions, for example, as her truly subversive texts.3 Even if Elaine Showalter notes Alcott's "resistance to the narrative conventions of domestic fiction" within her "generally formulaic and sentimental " texts, the decision to call a collection ofAlcott's lesser-known work Alternative Alcott may produce a simplistic bifurcation.4 As theorists of the camivaksque demonstrate, processes of transgression and convention cannot be so readily dissevered. Alcott's Hospital Sketches, as I will show, negotiates poles oftransgression and convention in complicated ways. It is a book (un)expectedly about amusement, masquerade, dirt, and pigs—carnival debris or figurations of the carnivalesque. In "Pigs and Pierrots: The Politics ofTransgression in Modern Fiction," Allon White describes the transformation of a European world punctuated regularly by festivals, holidays, and communal revelry into a world ofabstinence and denial exerted by a rising middle class. But for White, the suppression of carnival is not reducible to its demise. Rather, White finds "carnival debris"—everything from the once-gaping festive pig ambivalently endowed to the harlequin—still lurking in but now displaced into bourgeois cultural forms such as the Gothic and the novel. Once removed from their original setting, pigs and pierrots, in White's view, fail to serve the liberating purpose, the lifting of taboos on mind and body that they once did—"they are privatized, cut off from social protest and pleasure and assimilated to the subjective unconscious. Less Louisa May Akott61 and less the figures of social celebration and communal pleasure, they are the emblems of alienated desire, paranoid fantasy, and the individual will-to-power" (55). White's central point is that the literary author's deliberate or unconscious inversions are not always already transgressive but rather seem to serve the...