Resonant Themes Research Articles

Structuralism and King Oedipus

Structuralism is a way of decoding and studying aspects of human conduct, tradition, and love that relates factors of a conceptual system that reflects patterns underlying a superficial range. King Oedipus is King Laius’ biological son who he neglects at birth to prevent a prophecy by the Oracle that he would kill his father and marry his mother. He is adopted by a royal family in Corinth but later returns to Thebes and fulfills the prophecy mystically. He later finds out and pops his eyes out and his led out of the city by his daughter The French social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss applied the structuralist outlook to cultural phenomena like mythology and kinship relations. To interpret the Oedipus myth, he placed the specific story of King Oedipus within the context of the whole cycle of tales connected with the city of Thebes. Concrete details from the narrative are seen in the framework of a wider structure and the overall system of elementary dyadic bigger structure is seen as pairs with obvious symbolic, thematic and archetypal resonance.

REFLECTIONS ON THE LIMITS OF LAW

To write a review essay about three books on what at first glance appear to be very divergent topics may seem like an impossible task. Samera Esmeir's book, Juridical Humanity, is an exploration of colonial law as it conscripted Egyptians into the grid of humanity; Judith Butler's Parting Ways is a critique of Zionism and state violence from a Jewish perspective; and Hussein Agrama's Questioning Secularism is about the paradoxical nature of secular power as manifest in modern Egypt. Despite this divergence, I found a rich thematic resonance between the three books that was unexpected and illuminating. All three books are deep meditations on the nature of law, its violent and performative character, even as they are also about a lot more. In what follows, I discuss the central themes of each book with a short rumination on their shared themes.

Shakespeare's Living Law: Theatrical, Lyrical, and Legal Practice

AbstractThis article examines the state of Shakespeare and Law studies in its early twenty‐first century incarnation. Departing from the long tradition of attending to the law's thematic resonance in Shakespeare's plays in order to extrapolate ahistorical ethical questions, critical work of the last decade has instead meticulously contextualized the literary texts in relation to an early modern legal culture that was a significant source of common experiences and accessible modes of analyzing experience. After an introduction to the scope of the field, the article zooms in on several key studies that explore the role of law in the development of Shakespeare's lyric and drama: I highlight works on the neglected topic of legal language in the Sonnets and on legal culture's contribution to dramatic narrative and mimetic innovation. I examine these projects in some detail in order to showcase critical methods that attend to the technicalities of both literary and legal language, concepts, forms, practices, and contexts with exceptional precision. I thereby situate the reader within a field that is rapidly coalescing by means of genuinely transformative contributions to Shakespeare studies and early modern legal history.

Buddhist Conceptual Rhyming and T.S.Eliot's Crisis of Connection in TheWaste Land and ‘Burnt Norton’

In this essay, I elaborate a reading of the Buddhist allusions throughout T.S. Eliot's poetry as being not confessions of Buddhist faith or merely syncretic experiments, but rather ‘conceptual rhymes’ with the crisis of personal connection that preoccupies Eliot across multiple texts. In the Buddhist concepts of pratītya-samutpāda, śūnyatā, saṃsāra, and the pretas, Eliot finds thematic resonances with his own emotional and psychological concerns and so alludes to these concepts in ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land and ‘Burnt Norton’ of Four Quartets as part of his characteristic poetic collage. By examining the connection between Eliot's personal poetic practice and the cross-cultural traditions upon which he drew, my argument intervenes in a long-standing debate regarding the meaning of Asian religio-philosophical influences in the poet's key texts. Moreover, by close reading the third movement of ‘Burnt Norton’ for Buddhist allusions, I attempt to refocus scrutiny of Buddhism in Eliot from the oft-discussed ‘Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land to Eliot's later Four Quartets, which remains under-examined for its Buddhist influences by scholars who instead attend to the latter text's more pronounced Vedic references.

Thomas Cole's Intemperate Empire

This article situates The Course of Empire (1836), a five-canvas cycle of landscape paintings by American artist Thomas Cole (1801–1848), within the discourse of physiology and temperance reform in the early nineteenth-century United States. Heretofore uninvestigated compositional and thematic resonances between The Course of Empire and Nathaniel Currier (1813–1888) and James Ives's (1824–1895) popular temperance print The Drunkard's Progress (1846) reveal how each charted terminal cases of unregulated consumption from the point of infection through the death of their respective subjects. The two scenes at the apex of these narratives, The Consummation of Empire and “A Confirmed Drunkard,” represent official diagnoses that mark precise moments when self-agency is irrevocably surrendered to objects of desire. They mark points of no return and initiate self-destruct sequences that cause the body and the body politic to fall to pieces.

Shattered Lives

Shattered Lives Floyd Skloot (bio) The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2011. 310 pages. $23.99) Kevin Wilson’s first book of fiction, the short-story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, appeared in 2009. In keeping with its title echo of Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), the book probes below the surface of daily life to find the strange landscapes and beasts inhabiting our psychological underworld. Praised for its weirdness, its “bent sense of humor” (Kirkus), “twisted storytelling” (Wall Street Journal), and quirkiness (Entertainment Weekly), the book was seen as both a promising debut and a genuine accomplishment. Its stories include parents who spontaneously combust, a company that provides stand-in grandparents for families in which real grandparents are sick or nasty or dead, men hired to tell people in detail about the worst things that could happen to them, babies born with mouthsful of perfectly developed [End Page xxviii] teeth, and sideshows and video games that take over lives. Critics evoked such authors as Carson McCullers and George Saunders, and placed Wilson as a hip gothic goofball with a serious undercoating. The very qualities that seemed to be most attractive and attention-grabbing—Wilson’s inventiveness, charm, and wackiness, his clever way with premises, flair for offbeat characters, his zappy energy—could also be a young fiction writer’s sharpest limitations. This is especially problematic as a writer makes the move from short stories to the novel, in which depth of character and insight, convincing narrative, and control of effect rather than conceptual dazzle and surface allure are needed to carry a reader along. With his first novel, The Family Fang, Wilson shows himself to be, at the age of thirty-three, a fully arrived, powerful, poised artist, capable of sustaining his gift for cultural edginess and eccentricity without sacrificing storytelling force, psychological keenness, or thematic resonance. His book has plenty of bizarre outlandish action in it, but also acute nuance—a feel for the way the intimate disturbances of childhood resonate deep into adulthood. It is a novel about a familiar topic—family dysfunction—rendered so freshly and managed so deftly that it feels new and shocking despite how much we may already have known about what parents can do. The four members of the Fang family at the novel’s core are, at least initially, likeable loonies at the margins of artistic expression. Father Caleb and mother Camille are performance artists devoted to creating public discomfort, to jarring audiences out of complacency. In one instance they stage marriage proposals on board a sequence of airplanes, involving their own children and other passengers in the drama. In another scene they create fake coupons redeemable for free chicken sandwiches at a mall food court and hand them out to passersby, creating havoc when people demand their freebies. When possible the Fangs use their two children, Annie and Buster (also known, alarmingly enough, as Child A and Child B), as participants in their stunts. Growing up, Annie and Buster find themselves in radically shameful situations, as when they are made to play bad drum and guitar music in public while shouting crazy off-key lyrics, panhandling to raise funds for an operation on a sick dog that does not actually exist. “For two people who had never learned to play their instruments,” Wilson writes, “they were managing to perform even more poorly than expected.” Some of the pieces could easily be seen as assaults on Annie’s and Buster’s senses of identity or sexuality, as when they end up kissing passionately while playing Romeo and Juliet; or when Buster, at nine years old and wearing an evening dress, competes in and wins the Little Miss Crimson Clover’s Junior Miss beauty contest and then reveals himself to be male after the crown has been placed on his wigged head. It was, clearly, a very weird childhood in which the children were viewed primarily as assets, compelled to assume varying identities, and placed in provocative and confusing situations regularly. This advice from [End Page xxix] their mother is typical of the kind of lessons they learned: “What you...

Coleridge's "The Improvisatore": Poetry, Performance, and Remediation

oral improvisation of poetry, a long-standing tradition in Italy and other Mediterranean cultures, became widely known across Europe during the early 19th century. In Italy, the male improvvisatore had a history going back at least to the Renaissance, and by the 18th century female improvisers or improvvisatrici were not uncommon. During the Romantic period, especially when the end of the Napoleonic Wars brought about an increase in international mobility, visitors to Italy regularly witnessed performances of orally improvised poetry in venues ranging from marketplaces to salons and theatres; responses to these performances can be found in the writings of well-known and lesser-known tourists and expatriates, among them Goethe, Byron, the Shelleys, and Madame de Stael. As descriptions of real-life improvvisatori and improvvisatrici appeared in travel literature and as Romantic poems like Byron's Beppo or Don Juan adopted some of the characteristics of improvisation, fictionalized representations of improvisers also began to feature with increasing frequency in 19th century literature. Parallel to this textually mediated reception, another channel of communication was opened up by improvvisatori who (ravelled and performed outside of Italy. As touring performers adapt to local conditions, these on-the-spot performances in cities such as Paris, Berlin, and London generate interesting variations on the traditional format according to which the improviser composed verses spontaneously on topics proposed by audience members, often in a specified genre, metre, or rhyme scheme. rise and decline of poetic improvisation as a mode of performance can be traced with some precision based on schedules of tours and reports of performances, the density of coverage in the periodical press, and the frequency with which improvisers appear in literature and visual art. By these measures, the popularity of improvvisatori in England peaked in the mid-1820s. But the sources that make it possible to identify this historical trend simultaneously reveal the wide-ranging thematic resonances of the improvisational mode. Improvisational composition and performance turns out to be an apt paradigm for the 1820s as an era of transition, rapid communication, self-conscious theatricality, and experimentation with new media such as literary-cultural magazines that respond nimbly--just as improvisers do--to the demands of audiences and markets. Perhaps recognizing its affinity with extemporizing performers, the 1820s periodical press provides avid coverage of their activities; literary magazines and newspapers struggle to find effective ways of advertising, reviewing, documenting, disseminating, and giving some permanence to the ephemeral experience of live improvised performance. Poetic improvisation, which in the 19th century always has an anomalous medial status as an oral form of poetry embedded in an age of print, thus brings about reflections on the relations between spectatorship and reading, immediacy and deferral, ephemerality and permanence, and the kinds and degrees of interaction that occur between writer or performer and readership or audience. Many of these reflections converge in Coleridge's intriguing though little-known late text The Improvisatore. By contextualizing it within the experience and reception of improvised poetry in 1820s London, I want to suggest that this enigmatic text brings into focus the issues and anxieties surrounding the status of poetry within the rapidly evolving print and performance culture of late Romanticism. During the post-Waterloo era, numerous poets and improvvisatori travelled abroad for political as well as professional reasons; in many cases they were compelled to flee repercussions for their actual or suspected involvement in revolutionary activities. Several members of the diaspora who took refuge in London attempted to continue their literary activities and build a reputation among the English public as well as the expatriate community by serving as Italian correspondents for literary magazines, offering university courses and public lectures on literature and history, and, in some cases, displaying their abilities as improvisers. …

Transnational Movement Innovation and Collaboration: Analysis of World Social Forum Networks

In this article we first trace the ideological development and collective framing of the World Social Forum (WSF) as a non-hierarchical gathering for collaboration and networking within the global justice movement. We then analyze the consequences of organizational design, thematic resonance, and technological innovations implemented to produce more open and horizontal collaboration. We do this by conducting two-mode network analysis of organizations that facilitated sessions and workshops during two separate meetings (2003 and 2005) of the WSF in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Our findings indicate that organizational affiliations were less hierarchical in 2005, but we uncover mixed results from analyzing patterns of interaction produced by individual organizations and groups of organizations. Finally, we discuss the implications of such macro-level innovations on the dynamics of multi-organizational fields (collaboration, coalition building, and thematic resonance) and the contributions of such an approach to the study of transnational organizational networks.

French Theory in South America

IN SOUTH AMERICA Janell Watson Throughout his life as a psychother apist, activist, and theorist, Felix Guattari sought ways to make polit ical parties, militant groups, insti tutions, and analysis function more openly and less hierarchically. His aim was to foster subjectivities that would be freer, richer, and more singular than the standardized sub jectivities made available by Inte grated World Capitalism. Newly translated into English, Molecular Revolution in Brazil offers engaging and lively reflections on this prob lematic. book is not, however, one of Guattari's major theoretical works and, despite thematic reso nances, is not representative of his mature monographs.1 It consists mainly of bits of lecture interspersed with conversations from a trip to Brazil. This book is more a kind of travel journal than a work of philosophy, psychoanalysis or poli tics, wrote Guattari for the back cover of the first Brazilian edition. Having achieved a certain notori ety in France as coauthor (with Gilles Deleuze) of Anti-Oedipus (1983; L'Anti-Oedipe, 1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987; Mille Pla teaux, 1980) as well as for his political militancy, in 1982 Guattari trav eled throughout Brazil at the invi tation of Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik. Her original proposal for a series of university lectures was quickly modified by Guattari, who favored meetings, talks, and conversations in mostly nonaca demic venues, hosted by a variety of groups, including the Workers' Molecular Revolution in Brazil by Felix Guattari and Suely Rolnik. Translated by Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes. New York:

Setting up Copernicus? Astronomy and Natural Philosophy in Giambattista Capuano da Manfredonia's Expositio on the Sphere

AbstractIn 1499, while Copernicus studies in Bologna, the commentary on Sacrobosco's Sphere by the Padua master Francesco Capuano da Manfredonia first appears in print. It will be revised and reprinted several times thereafter. Like Copernicus, Capuano has a high view of astronomy and mingles astronomical and physical considerations (flies moving on wheels, men on ships, impetus, comets, raptus). Also, Capuano offers a flawed argument against a two-fold (diurnal and zodiacal) motion of the Earth. Multiple thematic resonances between Capuano's commentary and De revolutionibus, I, 5-11, suggest the hypothesis that Copernicus is answering Capuano, whose work was owned by Joachim Rheticus, if not Copernicus himself.

Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (review)

Reviewed by: Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China Tina Mai Chen (bio) Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, editors. Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. x, 343 pp. Paperback $26.95, ISBN 0–7425–3825–7. Gender scholars of late imperial and twentieth-century China have drawn our attention to the prescriptive work of nei and wai in the social, cultural, and political formations of everyday life. Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China further complicates our understanding of nei and wai as the book takes these spatial categories as its collective starting point. The focus of the book is an investigation of how male and female laboring bodies redefine nei and wai while often working within and against the normative but fluid categories. This volume is notable for its coherence and the ongoing conversations across chapters concerning the operation of spatial organization and its differential meanings in various times, locations, and occupations. Because the book presents the work of many of the most prominent scholars currently researching gender issues in late imperial and modern China, readers will not be surprised by the high quality of all the chapters (although depending on the reader's familiarity with the work of specific authors, readers may find themselves in expected territory as some offer continued research and analysis from projects that have been the subject of earlier publications). Regardless of the knowledge one brings to the volume, what is most productive about this book and what distinguishes it from other anthologies is its organizational structure and the ways in which it encourages the reader to move through the book not as separate chapters but as sustained dialogue. My comments focus on this aspect of Gender in Motion because it is in this area that most anthologies fall short. In the case of Gender in Motion, the book is organized in three sections that eschew a chronological order and instead opt for thematic resonance. Section 1 is titled "Patterns of Mobility," and the articles by Matthew Sommer, Susan Mann, Luo Suwen, and Ellen Judd interrogate when, where, and to what end women's subjectivity and social position emerged through prescribed movement. Section 2, "Spatial Transformations," features articles by Joan Judge, Catherine Yeh, Madeline Yue Dong, Wang Zheng, and Wendy Larson. Together these scholars shift attention from the mobility of individuals and groups to focus on how space has been conceptualized in gendered terms. The final section of the book, "Boundaries," includes the research of Kenneth Pomeranz, Bryna Goodman, Deborah Sang, and Gail Hershatter. Here the emphasis is on women who live and work in the interstices of fluid gender categories and the constant redefinition of these categories. [End Page 447] Rather than rehearse the arguments put forward in each article, I would like to highlight the questions that the authors collectively raise. In section 1, each of the essays demonstrates how typical understandings of nei and wai categories as the inner/familial realm versus the outer/public realm are too constraining. That is, if we are to understand the diversity of activities and forms of mobility of women that arise in relation to familial obligations and class standing, we need to consider the expansiveness of nei, as well as its restrictive prescripts. In this regard, Matthew Sommer puts forward two important arguments in his analysis of the practice of "getting a husband to support a husband (zhaofu yangfu)": first, maintaining and respecting the family unit in a moment of economic crisis is often the criteria and impetus for the practice (rather than having the family challenged by the addition of a sexual partner or second husband for the wife); and, second, sex work is not necessarily understood by the women and men involved in the arrangements as the primary defining aspect of their lives. These two points resonate with the analyses presented by Mann, Luo, and Judd in terms of the class dimensions of the practices of nei and wai and the expansive character of the physical space of nei. In her...

Stolen Cloaks in Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae

I argue that the cloaks that the women steal from their husbands in Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae have thematic resonances that extend well beyond their use as part of the women's transvestite disguise. The filching of the cloaks is portrayed as lvpodusia ("mugging") by Blepyrus at lines 535–38. Once he makes this association, the cloaks come to signify not only gender reversal but also the oikos-polis dialectic and socioeconomic issues that are at the play's core. Praxagora capitalizes on these associations as she presents her agenda to Blepyrus. The stolen cloaks thus link the cross-dressing and economic aspects of the play.

Nabokov's "Ada" and Sidney's "Arcadia": The Regeneration of a Phoenix

This article argues that an important feature of Nabokov's "Ada or Ardor" is its evocation of Sidney's romance "Arcadia" and sonnet sequence "Astrophel and Stella". Particular echoes and general thematic resonance are investigated, and found to be too pervasive to be coincidental. Reasons are offered why Nabokov might have been secretive about such an ancestry. They concern his political, erotic, and literary self-construction, and underlie his whole œuvre, adding a layer of meaning to his chosen nom de plume, 'Sirin'.

The Ernest Hemingway Companion (review)

BOOK REVIEWS · 9 9 The Ernest Hemingway Companion. Edited by Somdatta Mandai. Salt Lake City, UT and Kolkata, India: SAS Enterprise, 2002. These eighteen essays, designedto bring"within reach ofthe Indian students ofAmerican literature some ofthe best articles written on Hemingway during the last two decades," is a somewhat curious assortment. Six ofthe pieces are reprints—four ofthose by Hemingway Society stalwarts: Scott Donaldson ("Humor in The Sun Also Rises"), Peter Hays, ("Exchange Between Rivals: Faulkner's Influence on The Old Man and the Sea"), Miriam Mandel ("A Reader's Guide to Pilar's Bullfighters"), and Bickford Sylvester (Wasteland Parallels Unifying In Our Time). The two reprinted Indian contributions are achapter fromE. NageswaraRao's ErnestHemingway:A Studyofhis Rhetoric, and"Picasso, Hemingway, and the Bull," an interesting and useful comparison byIndrani Haldar. The two other non-Indian contributions, Judy Henn's and Alexander Dupuis',arebothfocusedonHemingway'srelationshiptoTurgenev,theformer anextendedpiecewhichattemptsto establisha"dialogic"engagementbetween Turgenev's andHemingway'srespective TorrentsofSpring,whilethelatterlooks to A Sportsman's Sfatches for influences on Hemingway's style. Henn suggests thatHemingway's"unwrittengoal"inwriting TorTenfc"seemstobeamodernist manifesto, upsetting the literary consensus."And that he "mixes and matches elements ofplot, characterization, andtheme"in an effort"to better Turgenev" andtogalvanize"writerstoabandonthepost-romantictendenciesatthe endof the nineteenth century." Although I'm not sure what that means, I think it's obvious that Hemingway's Torrents hardly reduces Turgenev's by a trickle. In general, I have the impression that Henn is much more comfortable and informative in explicating Turgenev's text, introducing Hemingway's pastiche ofa parodyalmost as an intrusive obligation. Dupuis' short essaysuggests that Turgenev's avoidance ofa conventional narrative scheme in Sketchesin favor of "snapshots ofplaces,characters,situations"mayverywellhave providedsome guidanceforHemingwayinhis assemblage ofpieces forIn OurTime. Amongthe remainingessays are Chinananda Phattachary,"TheAlternate Titles of The Sun Also Rises"; Ajanta Paul, "Biblical Resonances in Hemingway 's Short Fiction"; and Amitabha Sinha's rather incomprehensible improvisation on the opening paragraph ofA Farewell to Arms. Battachary the Hemingway review, vol. 22, NO. 2, spring 2003. Copyright © 2003 The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Published by the University ofIdaho Press, Moscow, Idaho. JOO- THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW picks up various thematic resonances from the titles which Hemingwaywas contemplatingforthe novel: "Riverto the Sea,""Two Lie Together,""The Old Leaven," "Fiesta," and "The Lost Generation." He tries to demonstrate how each projected title reflects different possible nuances on the complexities of the novel and why Hemingway finally opted for The Sun Also Rises. And Paul's essayis a somewhat Procrustean effort to argue that"the use ofChristian motifs," the "forging of consonances with Scriptural situation and mood," the "appropriation ofimages___ related to both the Testaments," as well as"the frequent adoption ofthe rhythms ofthe King James Biblei"force the reader to investigate the emotive overlay of Biblical meanings in Hemingway 's fiction. Not so surprisingly, there are four essays dealing with The Old Man and the Sea. Dipendu Chakrabart's The Old Man and the Sea and Riders to the Sea: An Inter-textual Encounter" seems to me a striking example of the problems in intertextual studies. While it is certainly true that anything can be compared with anything else, the encounter can easily be arbitrary and meaningless. More promising, I think, is Sobha Chatopadhya's "Intertextualities : The Old Man and the Sea and Islands in the Stream'' Since we know that Hemingway was trying to fuse the various components that were eventually published as Islands, including "The Sea in Being" which became The Old Man, the recurrence of themes in the two texts is natural and potentially illuminating. The third essay by Pralhad A. Kulkarni ("Santiago: A Sinless 'El Campeón'") is a brief paean to Santiago whom Kulkarni sees as a Christian champion whose struggle for humanity will lead to an inevitable crucifixion, but may consequently introduce "a world of hopes, certainty, happiness; a world without hostility, enmity and war." The final essay of this group is Priyadarshi Patnaik, "The Old Man and the Sea in Light of Rasa Theory: An Indian Reading of Hemingway." With detailed examples from various Indian texts, Patnaik explains that Rasa can be roughly understood as "aesthetic emotion or rapture"—an experience in which the properly sensitized reader/adept transcends· his own identity, his world, his...

Cyclic Design and Thematic Resonance in Iliad Books 3 and 6

The Iliad is designed in three cycles, books 1 through 8, 9 through 15, and 16 through 24, in which thematically analogous marked segments (« books ») occupy analogous positions in parallel order. Within each cycle thematically analogous books occupy analogous positions in reverse order (i.e., «ring-composition»). Some of the stylistic and interpretive implications of the design may be tested by sampling two books which the design indicates should be related. Book 3 comes right before the turn of the first cycle, book 6 right after the turn. The examination shows that virtually every scene in each book has a strong resonance with at least one scene in the other. Thematic analysis of the analogous scenes indicates a consistent trajectory of thematic development.

Major Systems of Thematic Resonance in the Iliad

It has been suggested (Heiden 1996) that in the Iliad thematically analogous "Achilles-decision" books (books 1, 9, and 16) and thematically analogous "Zeus-decision" books (books 8, 15, and 24) are arranged in analogous positions at the beginnings and ends of three "movements" (1-8, 9-15, 16-24 = A1-Z1, A2-Z2, A3-Z3). This observation provides the key to a comprehensive system that relates many distant segments of the Iliad. The parallel relationship of thematically resonant beginnings and ends extends to the interior segments of the "movements". Moreover, each movement displays an internal arrangement based on symmetrical ring composition. These two systems are coordinated. They might have served to cue audience recall and comparison of distant thematically resonant segments.

I and Tao: Martin Buber's Encounter with Chuang Tzu (review)

Topical Book Reviews 133 And despite my specific criticisms, I fmd this an extr~mely valuable work that deserves serious study by anyone interested in interfaith dialogue.I Harold Kasimow Department of Religious Studies Grinnell College I and Tao: Martin Buber's Encounter with Chuang Tzu, by Jonathan R. Herman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. 278 pp. $49.50. Is there any real justification to the claim that a thematic resonance exists between Chuang Tzu and Buber's I and Thou? Given that Buber's sinological skills were minimal at best, and that he based his "translation" of Chuang Tzu (Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-tse), written a decade before I and Thou, almost entirely on the English translations of Giles and Legge, can it be evaluated as anything other than a dated study by a non-specialist? In I and Tao, Jonathan Herman takes up a range of hermeneutical challenges embedded in these questions and rethinks them by suggesting several possibilities: the possibility of relating Buber's dialogical principle directly to Chuang Tzu's mystical philosophy; the possibility that I and Thou represents a crystallization of an ongoing reception of Chuang Tzu; the possibility that Chuang Tzu was the original dialogical philosopher; and, most significantly, the possibility that I and Thou can be regarded in part as a protracted transformation ofself before the text of Chuang Tzu. Rejecting the standard "view that Buber's initial engagement with Chuang Tzu marks a transitional philosophical stage," Herman contents that "the fundamental ingredients of the I-Thou relationship are in fact already present within Buber's encounter with Chuang Tzu . .." (p.163). The book is divided into two sections: 1) annotated re-translations (from German to English) of Buber's text (from Chinese to English to German) of Chuang Tzu, followed by Buber's commentary, and 2) three hermeneutical chapters and a brief conclusion. Like Buber's translations of Hasidic tales, his Taoist text contains a "self-conscious hermeneutical framework" reflected in the text itself and in his "Afterword," or "Nachwort," originally translated by Maurice Friedman as "The Teaching of the Tao" in Buber's 1957 collection ofessays, Pointing the Way. Herman's translation ofBuber's IAn earlier version of this review appeared in CCAR Journal, Vol. 41, No.1 (Winter 1994), pp. IOO~I03. 134 SHOFAR Spring 1999 Vol. 17, No.3 translation of the text of Chuang Tzu is not the fIrst. Of a recent "free rendering" of the same material by Alex Page, Chinese Tales (1991), Hennan writes that Page "was not particularly familiar with either Chuang Tzu or Buber and had a general disinterest in mysticism" (p. xi). Hennan, on the other hand, followed Buber's Gennan in the original edition as precisely as possible, and provides scholarly annotations based on the original Chinese. Although the henneneutic chapters of the second part depend upon the text and commentary of the fIrst part, due to their interrelated originality they are of great interest. In the fIrst, "The Historical Question: The Matter of Textual Reconstruction," Hennan focuses on Buber's approach to the text as "a poetic parable-presentation ofthe 'teaching'" (p. 108) which elicits personal transfonnation. More than the resulting "translations," it is Buber's henneneutic that most interests Hennan. In the second, "The Henneneutic Question: The Matter of Textual Interpretation," it is Hennan's intention to determine the "suppositions and goals ofBuber's henneneutic agenda" that establish "criteria by which one can evaluate the legitimacy ofhis conclusions" (p. 154), and then to explore his translation and commentary (and their relation to one another) in light of these criteria. In the most signifIcant of the three chapters, "The Further Henneneutic Question: The Matter of Textual Reception," Hennan "addresses the possibility of relating Buber's dialogical principle directly to Chuang Tzu's mystical philosophy (p. 157). Here the plot thickens. Buber's critique of mysticisms of unity (and, by implication, of his own earlier views) is well known. It is Hennan's admittedly unorthodox contention, however, that I and Thou is "the second interpretative layer of Buber's ongoing engagement with Chuang Tzu, the first being his commentary portion" (p. 168). Anticipating that his proposal may be...

Shashthi's Land: Folk Nursery Rhyme in Abanindranath Tagore's "The Condensed-Milk Doll"

Kunstmarchen (art fairytales) are everybody's business, and so no one's, for Kunstmarchen studies fall uneasily between the areas of folklore and folktale, on the one hand, and fantasy fiction and children's literature on the other. The classic Bengali Kunstmarchen, Kheer-er putul or The Condensed-Milk Doll (1896), by Abanindranath Tagore, uses traditional folk nursery rhymes. The A. considers the generic implications of drawing upon these rhymes, their part in providing a mise-en-scene, their thematic resonances with the new text, the formal play involved in deploying them, the possible influence of Lewis Carroll for the technique of using them in a new text, and their use in a companion text by Tagore.

Editor's Column

-SkEditor's Column ^sThe rich diversity of work in this second general issue of Literature and Medicine fulfills our best hopes for the journal's success as a semiannual publication. The essays here deal with literary works ranging from nineteenth-century British and American narratives to recent feminist utopias set far in the future. Some of the works—Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and Richard Selzer's stories—will be familiar to many of our readers. Others—Fanny Burney's "Narrative of the Last Illness and Death of General d'Arblay," Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale—may be new to them. Yet even among the diverse texts and scholarly approaches represented here, thematic resonances echo subtly from essay to essay. Stephanie P. Browner opens this issue with a reconsideration of one of the canonical works of American literature. In her essay, "Authorizing the Body: Scientific Medicine and The Scarlet Letter," she maintains that The Scarlet Letter offers "a pointed critique that goes to the very center of nineteenth-century medical science—its claims to social authority and its political appropriation of the body" (p. 140). Drawing on the history of medicine, Browner argues that in this romance Hawthorne rejects nineteenth-century medicine's emphasis on observation and demonstrates in his narrative strategy the superiority of literature's competing epistemology—interpretation. Truth, according to Hawthorne , is to be found not on surfaces but in interiors, not in signs but in interpretations, not in literal readings but in symbolic meanings. Thus, simply to condemn Hester Prynne by equating the A inscribed on her chest with Adulteress would be to miss the "moral ambiguities" and "psychological complexities" (p. 151) that lie beneath the surface and to underestimate the radical challenge to patriarchal social authority that Prynne's untamed female body represents. Browner concludes by insisting on the dynamic tension between Hawthorne's claim for the superior authority of literature and language to tame Prynne's body and his "true desire to represent and celebrate the subversive possibilities of the body" (p. 158). Questions about the social control of women's bodies are also central to the novels discussed in this issue's second essay, Robert Shelton's Literature and Medicine 12, no. 2 (Fall 1993) vii-x © 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press EDITOR'S COLUMN "The Social Text as Body: Images of Health and Disease in Three Recent Feminist Utopias." In these feminist utopias (or dystopias), questions about gender inevitably lead to or intersect with questions about health, both individual and social. Shelton begins by arguing that the concepts of utopia and dystopia, like those of health and disease, are inherently asymmetrical. Then he uses two analogies —"Utopia is to health as dystopia is to disease" and "Health is to disease as utopia is to dystopia" (p. 162)—to structure his analyses of Russ's The Female Man, Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It is the second analogy, he claims, that "leads to the core issues (of order versus freedom) about the structure of society and the efficacy of medical science " (p. 167). This essay will not only introduce our readers to works they may not know but also lead them to rethink the concepts of health and disease. Read together, Browner's and Shelton's essays enhance each other by showing how powerfully questions of social control of the female body persist from one era to another, from past through present to future. In the third essay of this issue, "The Art of the Suture: Richard Selzer and Medical Narrative," Robert Leigh Davis uses the concept of suturing—literally, the surgical technique of closing wounds—to analyze textual closure in Selzer's writing. As a surgeon, Selzer routinely healed patients by suturing their wounds; as a writer, Davis argues, Selzer strives to heal by suturing medical narratives, by "closing off uncertainty and restoring a sense of continuity and shared meaning" (p. 178). Yet Selzer is aware of the danger of closure, of the stillness that...

Metaphor and meaning in D.H. Lawrence's later novels

Although D.H.Lawrence's later novels have been the subject of much discussion by critics, few scholars have recognized or dealt with his sense of craft. By examining Lawrence's careful and finely orchestrated strategies with language, especially metaphor, Humma argues that a number of the longer works - from Aaron's Rod on and including the posthumously published The Virgin and the Gipsy - are small masterpieces. Different in kind from Women in Love or The Rainbow, these fictions are very important in their own way. Humma maintains that the early and middle novels work largely through powerful symbols. Those of the last decade, though, develop through an intricate interlace of metaphor and symbolic detail. Humma devotes a chapter each to Aaron's Rod, The Ladybird, Kangaroo, St. Mawr, The Plumed Serpent, The Virgin and the Gipsy, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and The Eascaped Cock. Aaron's Rod, as a transitional work reveals much about Lawrence's narrative method and its dependence upon combinations of images. The Plumed Serpent, Humma suggests, is Lawrence's most ambitious failure. Other critics have faulted plot, character and meaning, but Humma sees incoherent as the basis for those other problems. Because Lawrence's shape myths essential to central actions and meanings, the reader cannot fully appreciate the later novels without studying the strategic function of metaphor in them. When Lawrence's method is successful as it is in Lady Chatterley's Lover, for example, figures of speech overlap each other, crossing boundaries in a web of interpenetrating metaphors that provide both structural integrity and thematic resonance. Paying close attention to the texts, Metaphor and Meaning in D.H. Lawrence's Later Novels show that Lawrence was far from the indifferent craftsman in his later fiction that he has frequently been considered. In fact, Lawrence was accutely aware that language and meaning are inseperable, that technique, as Mark Schorer said, is discovery. John Humma's perspective upon the art and meaning of Lawrence's later work provides a major revaluation of this last phase in the writer's career.