Literary Voice Research Articles

Illicit Motherhood: Recrafting Postcolonial Feminist Resistance in Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven

Cultural constructions of passive motherhood, especially within domestic spaces, gained currency in India and Ireland due to their shared colonial history, as well as the influence of anti-colonial masculinist nationalism on the social imaginary of these two nations. However, beginning from the latter half of the nineteenth century, postcolonial literary voices have not only challenged the traditional gendering of public and private spaces but also interrogated docile constructions of womanhood, particularly essentialized representations of maternity. Domestic spaces have been critical narrative motifs in these postcolonial texts through simultaneously embodying patriarchal domination but also as sites where feminist resistance can be actualized by “transgress(ing) traditional views of … the home, as a static immobile place of oppression”. This paper, through a comparative analysis of maternal characters in Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven, argues that socially disapproved/illicit relationships in these two representative postcolonial Irish and Indian narratives function as matricentric feminist tactics that subvert limiting notions of both domestic spaces and gendered liminal postcolonial subjectivities. I highlight that within the context of male-centered colonial and nationalist literature, the trope of maternity configures the domestic-space as the “rightful place” for the existence of the feminine entity. Thus, when postcolonial feminist fiction reverses this tradition through constructing the “home and the female-body” as sites of possible resistance, it is a counter against dual oppression: both colonialism and patriarchy. My intervention further underscores the need for sustained conversations between the literary output of India and Ireland, within Postcolonial Literary Studies, with a particular acknowledgement for space and gender as pivotal categories in the “cultural analysis of empire”.

Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre

Reviewed by: Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre Patti M. Marxsen Clitandre, Nadège T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. UP of Virginia, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8139-4187-5. Pp. xx + 249. It is rare for an entire book of literary criticism to be devoted to a Haitian writer. In her deeply nuanced study, Clitandre adopts an approach that resembles literary biography, although her theoretical concerns release the apparent subject, Danticat, from the role of central character and authorial anchor. Rather, the true subject emerges as countless other subjectivities, voices masked by simplistic categories or lost in collective cultural identities. In defiance of such erasure, Clitandre's project zeroes in on the lives of approximately 1 million hyphenated Haitians living outside the "homeland." Her method is clear from the outset—the deconstruction of a unique diasporic consciousness forged by Danticat across two decades of writing that embraces history, displacement, loss, assemblage, and "the everyday lives and narratives of diasporic subjects" (15). Clitandre's close reading of recent memoirs and major novels—Breath, Eyes, Memory, The Dew Breaker, and Farming of Bones—is filtered through the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus in which the woodland nymph, known for her melodious voice, is silenced by the jealous goddess Juno. This artful deployment of Ovid's voiceless Echo of antiquity is closely linked to Clitandre's argument for Danticat's "feminist revisioning of Haitian history from a diasporic lens" (16). Through a sustained argument, she asserts that "Danticat's fictional texts uncover the silenced, displaced, and disavowed histories of Haitian people in general and Haitian women in particular" (18). This approach necessarily engages the author and reader with significant events of Haitian history as the concept of "Echo chamber" is redefined as a dynamic space that captures unpredictable resonance. From Danticat's first reading of Haitian literature at the Brooklyn Public Library as a young girl in the 1980s, herself part of the Duvalier-driven diaspora, we come to understand her literary sources. We also encounter the meaning of personal "creation myths" in diasporic lives, those interiorized experiences that draw on historical, fragmented, and inherited memory. To this end, and with deliberate emphasis on the Duvalier era and its aftermath (1957–87), Clitandre convenes a conversation among historians, literary critics, writers, psychoanalytic theorists, and contemporary scholars to address the problem of memory in societies marked by violence, censorship, and silence. Indeed, [End Page 190] in Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010), Danticat acknowledges that"Grappling with memory is, I believe, one of many complicated Haitian obsessions" (34). Memory also emerges full-force in her "family memoir" Brother, I'm Dying (2007) focused on the"separate but intertwined lives"of her father and uncle, a Baptist pastor who died in a Miami detention center in 2007 (169). Given its vast terrain and articulate interpretation of a major literary voice, Clitandre's book is highly original and establishes a fresh model of scholarship in the still unexcavated silences of Haitian literature. Patti M. Marxsen Independent Scholar Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

‘I’m writing about strange people, people on the edge, people that society doesn’t like much’: the precariat in the work of Agnes Owens.

This article explores the way in which Agnes Owens, a 20th century working-class writer from Scotland, gives a literary voice to those most marginalized and underprivileged, a category of workers that is often defined as the precariat. The first part of the article traces the historic origins of the term precariat within marxism, then linking it to the growing number of people working today in low paid, short-term and uninsured jobs often beyond the pale of the rest of society. Their accompanying condition of neo-poverty is what Agnes Owens sought to dramatize in her novels and short stories, two of which – “Arabella” and Bad Attitudes – are chosen for more detailed discussion. The article seeks to show how Owens not only documents the lives of this modern precariat, but also how these new forms of social deprivation are feminized, since it is clearly the women who are most vulnerable in this new context of social and economic precarity.

Dimensiunea alterității în romanele Fundamentalist fără voie (2007) și Exit West (2017) de Mohsin Hamid

The present paper proposes an alternative to the well-established notion that postcolonial literature is still a marginal literary category in the twenty-first century, trying to demonstrate that, in fact, postcolonial voices have long occupied a forefront position in the reception of the critics and general public alike, gradually turning their books into both successful marketable products and ideological weapons. Reasons may vary from the readers’ mere interest in becoming acquainted with the culture of a perpetual other that has moved closer in space after the fall of the colonial empires to guilt for the past treatment of these territories and of their peoples. From the radical approaches to postcolonialism in the 1950s-1960s, which have now become classical theoretical texts, to the cultural and historical affirmation in the 1980s and reaffirmation of identity, in the context of rising Islamophobia after 9/11, writers labelled as postcolonial now push the boundaries, heading straight to the centre of the Western Canon. Asserting their identity, either in `je suis l’autre’ fashion or by highlighting their hybridity, the literary voices of the East are no longer just an exotic niche of English literature. A good case in point is Mohsin Hamid, Pakistani-British author whose novels, nominated for important Western literary prizes, provide a fresh perspective of what means to be the other in the eyes of the West.

Travelling Home: The Scandinavian Transnational Adoptee Identity on the Move

ABSTRACT: Globalization and migration are strong themes in contemporary Scandinavian literature. In this literature, which discusses migration in relation to complex questions about home, national identity, and the self, memoirs written by Scandinavian transnational adoptees stand out as a new intriguing literary voice. This raises the question how we can understand Scandinavian transnational adoptees as migrants and travelling subjects. By using Trinh T Minh-haʼs idea of “home” as a source of movement or travelling as a starting point, this article explores the Scandinavian transnational adoptee subject as a migrant identity and as a traveller in literary works written by these adoptees. The article focuses on two physical journeys: the journey through which the transnational adoptee arrives in the Scandinavian country as an immigrant and the journey he/she takes when revisiting the country of birth as a traveller/tourist. This ends up in a discussion of how “home” could be interpreted in the complex migration identity that is the Scandinavian transnational adoptee identity.

Driving learning development professionalism forward from within

Current conceptions view professions as negotiable, transient territories which are shaped by the discourses that describe them. The voices which influence how a profession evolves arise from both within and outside it. Theories on professionalism have been rigorously applied to teaching and academia. Learning Development exists within both spheres, yet its complex growth patterns have resulted in a fragmented and less theorised sense of professional identity. The rationales which create and fund Learning Development roles lean towards a model of fixing ‘deficits’ in students and their work; meanwhile, Learning Development’s professional association, ALDinHE, rejects those same deficit premises. In this article, using a theoretical framework and terminology from Evans (2008; 2011), I analyse the differences between those states of professionalism ‘demanded of’ and ‘enacted by’ Learning Developers. By coding various external and internal documents which frame job roles, I deduce how the two ‘professionalisms’ interact to resolve their inherent tensions; I identify a point of coalescence around Learning Development as a niche for mediation and demystification. I also explore how Learning Developers believe their profession can best evolve and sustain, via community-internal voices in literature and a survey of 14 ALDinHE members. Findings suggest that Learning Development remains a unique and valued activity, to which professional identity is attached. However, a precise sense among the ALDinHE community of what ‘equals’ a professional Learning Developer remains debated. More coherent is the community’s wish to see its values (Learning Development) permeate across the wider higher education landscape.

Blurring boundaries and advancing interreligious understanding by engaging textual ‘others’ in a women’s interfaith book group

This article casts analytical light on how Jewish, Christian and Muslim women develop understanding of religious identities by engaging with multidimensional textual ‘others’ in the Daughters of Abraham interfaith book groups. It focuses on a group discussion of a rabbi’s memoir about her religious journey. Drawing on ethnographic material and Talal Asad’s analysis of the relationship between text and reader, I examine how narratives outside primary religious texts influence ideas about Jewish, Christian and Muslim identities. I argue that the Daughters members’ appropriation of literary voices advances their engagement with religious diversity by developing understanding of religious self and others. Moreover, members’ navigation of inter- and intra-religious relations during discussions of texts blur boundaries for inclusion into this interfaith encounter. This examination raises questions about issues of identity, power dynamics and interfaith relations. Importantly, it provides novel insight into the understudied areas of women’s interreligious encounter and shared reading practices.

‘A Saxon who's learnt a lot from the Americans’: Clemens Meyer in a Transnational Literary Context

In recent years, Clemens Meyer has emerged as the literary voice of societal underdogs. Initially celebrated as the ‘tattoo-man of German literature’ (Elmar Krekeler) whose ‘rough’ East German background seemed to have certified the authenticity of his subject, with his growing success, Meyer has managed to shake off the exclusive, and somewhat limiting, label of ‘East German writer’ with its often specifically provincial associations. The publication of his latest novel Im Stein (2013), which, translated as Bricks and Mortar (2016), was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017, has finally led to Meyer's recognition as a more highbrow writer whose work has entered the transnational literary field. In his novel, Meyer self-consciously references world literary predecessors who have inspired him (for example Dos Passos and Hemingway) but adapts these literary models to develop a singular style that goes beyond mere intertextual allusions. My reading of Im Stein, a multi-voiced novel that revolves around organized prostitution in an unnamed East German city post-1989, thus ties in with recent debates focussing on the notion of ‘world literature’. Following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's thoughts on ‘singularity’ in relation to world literature, I argue that it is precisely Meyer's engagement with the specificity of his subject matter through writing ‘transnationally’ that allows the author to achieve ‘singularity’. This then paves the way for his work's ‘universalizability’ and, consequently, for Meyer's conscious adaptation of his work to world literature.

Literary translation: trend and practice in Bangladesh

Literary translation is a gateway to bringing in unity amid diversity in literature. There are many prominent literary voices in different cultures and communities who deserve space, attention and recognition in world literature. Literary translation plays an important part in making the voices familiar throughout the world. Translation of Bengali literature into English, thus, helps Bangladeshi writers bring to light the country and its culture on the world stage. Two forms of translation take place in the country: from Bengali into English and vice versa. The practice of literary translation in Bangladesh is wide-ranging, although English translation of Bangladeshi literature has not catapulted to international success, but the number of books translated into English to date is not few either. Academics and professionals have begun to grow interest in translating remarkable books into English, and they have, by this time, translated a good number of titles that are also enjoying warm reception. This paper is an attempt to demonstrate the trend and practice of literary translation, from Bengali into English, in Bangladesh. The paper also seeks to explore how Bangladeshis who translate from Bengali into English grapple not just with the target language but the target culture as well.

Beckett's Linguistics: The Digestion of German Philology

This essay considers Beckett's linguistics as a redemption of otherness, suggesting new sources for his well-known motif of digestion and expulsion from the German tradition. Watt as well as his postwar French are shown to signal a swallowing of Goethe on Beckett's part, and his notion of “das Fremde” as digested foreign origins. Beckett's poetics of ingestion are read in the context of his “Gnome,” a foreign voice both native to national literatures, and which seeks to escape its traditionally diminished and comically distorted form. Beckett's excretion of his origins is central to the motifs of re-digestion, expulsion, and recovery that identify his linguistics of canonical creation. This hidden Germanic tradition of theft, distortion, and expulsion of foreign treasures—the “Schatz” of “Indianer-Joe,” in Adorno's phrase—is in turn read as enabling Beckett's project of redeeming the displaced sources of his own canonical literary voice.

Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities by David Lawton

Reviewed by: Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities by David Lawton James B. Harr III Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities By David Lawton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/voice-in-later-medieval-english-literature-9780198792406?cc=us&lang=en&> Characterization and the use of framework narrative in the traditional sense have long dictated academic approaches to late-medieval literature, and while there have certainly been deviations, particularly as emerging critical theories are embraced by medieval scholarship, focus often returns to standard hermeneutical approaches to literature of the Middle Ages. In his recent book, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature, David Lawton takes a fresh look at late-fourteenth to fifteenth-century literature and examines the medieval voice specifically articulated in (but certainly not limited to) the works of Chaucer and Langland through the analysis of public interiorities and modern criticism. "Public interiorities," as Lawton defines them, "are pieces of language—as speech or text—which already exist before they are revoiced by a new user" (8). He uses this term to uncover a layer of text neglected by previous studies as a means to reveal an interlinear voice, while concurrently repositioning medieval scholarship away from its preoccupation with "authority." In doing so, the intertextuality between classical, biblical, and medieval examples is exposed and a prevalent—and overlooked—element in medieval literary studies emerges. The book commences with a clear presentation of authorial objectives while briefly anticipating possible counterarguments. For example, Lawton mentions that he deliberately omits John Gower from the discussion as the breadth of his work and his place in Chaucerian discourse require a separate and devoted project. After briefly providing instances of public interiorities as a means to introduce the reader to the term, Lawton moves to the use of voice in literature. He carefully foreshadows his integration of modern examples to parallel and further elucidate the voice in medieval texts. In doing so, he simultaneously projects a relationship between the literary past and present, emulating "the practice of medieval authors" (11). Arguably, a significant challenge for Lawton [End Page 124] is in acknowledging a conceptualization of the voice while temporarily obscuring any delineation between the spoken word and the written word. As he readily admits, "Voice will not be easy to define, for it is not a determinate order of signs like figures or tropes but a volatile series of suggestions or cues that move between theme and address, between text and reader" (2). However, it is apparent by the end of the book that he has surmounted this difficulty. Divided into two parts, the book first focuses on voice and public interiorities. The second half of the book takes the concepts explicated in Chapters 1–4 and applies them to Piers Plowman, The Canterbury Tales, and fifteenth-century poetry. In Chapter 1, Lawton uses an example that would have been both recognized and embraced by the late-medieval writer: Saint Paul. In the context of Chaucerian texts, he uses Paul's voice to initially set up a conversation that has Chaucer, "the opposite pole to Paul on voice" (19), conversing with the apostle through his characters. For example, Paul's tenets are reflected in the sermon given by the Pardoner and (indirectly) rejected by the Wife of Bath. It is in this chapter that Lawton connects the voice to the soul, referencing several examples including those found in medieval art, making the concept of voice abstract. Chapter 2 moves to articulating the relationship between voice and public interiorities, thus imbricating the two distinct terms while using the modern (Proust) to juxtapose the medieval (Chaucer and Machaut). Lawton sums up this chapter by writing, "The voice…is complicated, bitter, full both of other texts and of more personalized grievance. It is a strange mixture of anger and urbanity, but no less public a voice for that" (60). Chapter 3 looks to modern critical theory and invokes Habermas's Offentlichkeit (public sphere) to define "public interiorities." Lawton is careful not to suggest that the two are the same but clearly asserts, "Public interiorities are not public spheres, however, though they arise precisely from the convergences and divergences...

Abner Woolman's Colonial World: Quaker Politics and Literature Before the American Revolution

Abner Woolman's Colonial World:Quaker Politics and Literature Before the American Revolution Daniel Gorman Jr. (bio) "A breed apart from the diarists who write simply to collect the days or preserve impressions of foreign places are those who set out in their books to discover who they really are. These are generally very serious people, more in the way of pilgrims, with inward destinations, than mere travelers. Some of them are after the sight of God; others are out to realize their full 'potential,' spiritual and otherwise; and some of them are carrying burdens of suffering they are unsure they can shoulder—they want to use their diaries to test, and add to, their strength." —Thomas Mallon.1 Introduction The journal of Abner Woolman, the younger brother of renowned Quaker mystic and abolitionist John Woolman, was never published during its author's lifetime. After Abner's death, John combined the journal with two letters Abner wrote to Burlington and Wilmington Quakers.2 As John explains in his introduction, he recopied the journal, "collect[ing] the substance, of sundry short chapters, part . . . from a stitched book, and part from loose papers which I found in said book. . . . The original papers in his hand writing I have by me. . . ."3 This post-mortem revision of a person's writings, combined with new commentary by members of the Society of Friends, was a common practice in the transatlantic Quaker community.4 When John died on a missionary trip to England in September 1772, the Friends around him documented his demise, just as he had written an account of Abner's death.5 Before he left for England, John sent Abner's manuscript and some of his own writings to the Philadelphia Meeting for Sufferings.6 The Meeting for Sufferings, a program of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, had responsibility over philanthropy, poor relief, records of the dead, and some book publishing in the mid-Atlantic colonies.7 By forwarding Abner's letters to the Meeting, John [End Page 19] fulfilled (and, by adding the journal to the manuscript, went beyond) Abner's hope that the letters "might be continued to be handed about" after his death.8 The layered structure of the Abner manuscript evokes a matryoshka doll. John's reflective introduction and epilogue bookend the manuscript. Some of Abner's original handwriting apparently survives, thanks to the two letters following John's introduction, before the recopied journal passages begin.9 The first letter (September 1770) is addressed to the Burlington County, N.J., meeting, while the undated second letter "concerning trading to the west indies" is addressed to Wilmington Quakers.10 42 short "chapters," written mainly between 1760 and August 1771, follow. 12 Abner's holographs are not extant. Despite his connection to John Woolman, Abner has received little scholarly attention. Mercy Griffith Hammond wrote in 1898 that the Woolman brothers shared a "singleness of purpose and humility of expression" alongside their "uncompromising testimony."12 Henry J. Cadbury (1968) deems Abner's journal valuable only for its insights into John's activities in 1770–72, and considers it "disappointing" that "so little of it [is] the original composition of John Woolman."13 James Proud (2010) takes the opposite view, deeming it likely that John wrote most of the Abner manuscript.14 Proud classifies the journal as part of John's ephemera. Thomas Slaughter (2008) and Geoffrey Plank (2012), like Cadbury, support Abner's authorship, while giving greater consideration to the journal. Plank highlights Abner's intellectual similarities to John.15 Slaughter deems the journal inferior to John's much-lauded Journal, but concedes that Abner's text is "a good example of the genre, reflects Abner's distinctive journey, and sheds light on John and on the brothers' relationship."16 I agree with Cadbury, Slaughter, and Plank in recognizing Abner's authorship, but I want to provide a more complete study of the journal's contents. I resist Hammond's description of singleness in regard to the Woolmans' literary voices. The revision of Abner's papers is a minor episode in John's career.17 Still, Abner should not be subsumed beneath John's reputation. Abner's prose matches the intensity of...

Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translation, Voices, Contexts by Sif Rikhardsdottir

Reviewed by: Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translation, Voices, Contexts by Sif Rikhardsdottir Anne Le Sif Rikhardsdottir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translation, Voices, Contexts ( Cambridge: D.S. Brewer 2017) 223 pp. We ought to move away from our impulse to consider Old Norse literature as void of emotion, particularly when compared to other medieval literatures. This is at the core of Sif Rikhardsdottir's Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts. In this book, she aims to forge news ways of reading representations of emotions in a wide array of Old Norse literature. That is, she suggests that there is in fact an emotive script present throughout the corpus, which runs counter to the long-held thought that the medieval Icelandic saga avoids emotive or subjective positioning. Rikhardsdottir mines these texts to uncover the ways in which these narratives in fact generate emotional impact or responses and to address the dearth of research done on medieval emotions in Old Norse studies. Throughout the introduction, Rikhardsdottir goes to great lengths to orient and give context to the reader. At times, this can be quite overwhelming, though she attempts to break it down piece by piece. She takes care to note that her methodology involves a selective reading of the Old Norse corpus with attention paid particularly to secular works from Iceland, though she shifts between Iceland and Norway as needed. An example of her thoroughness comes early in the introduction as she discusses emotion itself. When it comes to the question of emotion and how to define it, Rikhardsdottir is not timid about confronting the methodological issues that arise. As she lays out her methodology for her reader, it quickly becomes evident that her approach must mix science with the humanities. She references modern neurology and psychology, and she even hints toward anthropology. Of course, Rikhardsdottir also brings in medieval medicine and its conception of the mind-body continuum. This interdisciplinary approach is key, for Rikhardsdottir notes that her goal is "not to authenticate medieval emotion, but to locate emotionality within the text produced by the medieval mind and probe how this emotionality can still resonate in a meaningful manner with the modern mind" (13). In this way, Rikhardsdottir's work negotiates between biological processes and [End Page 268] different social contexts and how they construct emotional behavior in Old Norse literature. In addition to her justification of interdisciplinarity in her methodology, Rikhardsdottir spends time in her introduction discussing the importance of voice in literature, which she states has been unfortunately overlooked in medieval studies. To address voice and its connection to medieval textuality, Rikhardsdottir relies upon Paul Zumthor's theories of orality, which places an emphasis on the human voice in relation to text. This in turn eschews the boundaries between orality and textuality in favor of suggesting a relationship between these elements, thereby lending itself to vocality. Rikhardsdottir writes that "it is precisely this notion of medieval 'vocality' that serves as the premise of the proposed theorizing of voice and its relation to the emotive" (21). Rikhardsdottir addresses voice and vocality, since these concepts are key to the delivery of medieval texts, which she emphasizes were often read aloud to an audience. This performative aspect and its emotive possibilities are in turn of interest to Rikhardsdottir, because the "the interplay between the emotionality of a text and the voicing of this emotionality is at the forefront" of her book (22). Thus, Rikhardsdottir approaches emotion in Old Norse vernacular literature—and its various genres—while considering voice as a means of foregrounding the aesthetic range of emotive expression. Rikhardsdottir divides the rest of the book into various chapters that deal with different genres and themes. In the first chapter, entitled "Literary Identities and Emotive Scripts," she takes care to introduce and lay a foundation for the theorizing of "literary identities" and "emotive scripts" (25,27). Her main objects of study are the Norse translations of two texts: Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain ou le Chevalier ou lion as well as Thomas de Bretagne's Tristran. These texts are chosen to demonstrate how the Old Norse reconceptualizes emotive coding found in Old French courtly ideology. She thoroughly compares...

Spoiling The Stories: The Rise of Israeli Women's Fiction by Tamar Merin

Reviewed by: Spoiling The Stories: The Rise of Israeli Women's Fiction by Tamar Merin Orian Zakai SPOILING THE STORIES: THE RISE OF ISRAELI WOMEN'S FICTION, by Tamar Merin. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. 216 pp. $99.95 cloth; $34.95 paper; $34.95 ebook. Tamar Merin's Spoiling the Stories: The Rise of Israeli Women's Fiction offers a sophisticated perspective on Israeli women's prose from the Statehood Generation (a group of writers who began publishing during the 1960s and 1970s) and their writings' relationship to the male-centric canon of modern Hebrew literature. The book's three main chapters each offer a nuanced discussion of the literary corpus of one author: Yehudit Hendel, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, and Rachel Eytan, respectively. The analysis is guided by a mode of literary influence Merin terms "intersexual dialogue," a form of intertextuality in which women authors negotiate gender assumptions through poetics of dialogue, appropriation, and revision regarding their literary fathers, namely, canonical Hebrew figures such as S. Y. Agnon as well as non-canonical figures such as David Fogel and Uri Nissan Gnessin (p. 6). Along with drawing well-deserved attention to a group of writers who are little known to the English reader, this book is significant for offering an insightful discussion of the way women's literary voices are shaped within textual traditions that ostensibly privilege male voices. Women authors of the Statehood Generation did not gain as much critical and popular acclaim as their male counterparts. Notably, male authors of that generation such as A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz are the most widely read and translated Israeli authors even today. In contrast, Hendel, Kahana-Carmon, and Eytan are little known outside of Israel, and even among the Israeli reading public their work rarely resonates beyond the halls of academic and literary circles. This disparity speaks to the patriarchal structures that inform modern Hebrew literature and that Merin interrogates in this study. The introduction to the book aptly discusses the challenges that characterized women's entry into Hebrew literature. In traditional pre-Zionist Jewish society, women were excluded from studying the classic Hebrew texts of the Torah, the Midrash, and the Talmud and thus did not learn Hebrew. Women were therefore at a disadvantage when modern Hebrew language and literature emerged in the late nineteenth century, with few women participating in the fledgling literary scene. Furthermore, the traditional role assigned to the author of Jewish and Hebrew texts is that of an observer of the house of Israel, a poet-prophet whose mission is to comment on the situation of the people and guide them. Coming from a minority cultural position, women could not master the authority to comfortably occupy this position. Finally, women's positions in the field of Hebrew literature were limited by the androcentrism of the Zionist project [End Page 466] with its emphasis on the figures of the military hero and the halutz, the virile worker and defender of the land. Under these circumstances, women's entry into the Hebrew literary scene was a complicated endeavor. In setting out to chart the place of women within Hebrew literary history, the feminist scholar, Merin contends, faces a related issue, namely, how to account for the relationship between women authors and a literary tradition that is mostly masculine without reenacting a patriarchal Oedipal plot in which women's writing is subjugated to the symbolic order of the father. Against the grain of the Oedipal structure, Merin offers the term "intersexual dialogue" to encompass "the various literary strategies employed by Israeli female prose fiction writers expressing their voice within a male dominant and (still) inherently Oedipal literary tradition" (pp. 5-6). Through this framework, Merin is able to describe a bi-directional relationship between the women authors of the Statehood Generation and their literary fathers, in which women echo but also subvert and challenge masculine narratives. Chapter one focuses on the work of Hendel from the 1950s. Analyzing Hendel's novella Almanato shel Eliezer (1947; Eliezer's widow) and novel Rehov ha-Maderegot (1956; Street of Steps, 1963), Merin shows how Hendel invokes Agnon, a literary father rejected by the generation of authors before her. Adopting...

How Tatiana's voice rang across the steppe: Russian literature in the life and legend of Abai

The Kazakh poet Abai Qunanbaiuly (1845–1904) today enjoys a dual legacy as the father of modern Kazakh literature (as distinct from its oral tradition) and also as an enlightener who translated the Russian classics into Kazakh and acted as a vital bridge between the two cultures. Much of Abai's reputation owes its existence to the twentieth-century author, critic, and scholar Mukhtar Auezov (1897–1961), whose biographical writings on the poet formed the standard narrative of his life and work. Initiated in 1937, the year of the Pushkin centennial celebrations in the Soviet Union, Auezov's literary canonization of Abai hinges on the poet's acquisition of the Russian language and his transformative encounters with Russian-language texts – most notably among them, Pushkin's Dubrovskii and Evgenii Onegin. In Auezov's account, Abai's efforts lead to the discovery of an authentically Kazakh literary voice, heralded by his successful adaptation of Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin into traditional Kazakh song form. In analyzing this prominent episode of the Abai legend, I argue that Russian literature's “conquest” in Central Asia was in fact a multifaceted dialogue in which writers laid the foundation for distinct national literary traditions by appropriating the literature of the colonizer – and in particular by reading, translating, displacing, domesticating, and “disorienting” the figure of Pushkin.

Questioning Accountability in Contemporary Writing: Marcela Iacub's Investigative Journalism and Its Backlash

ABSTRACTThis article studies Marcela Iacub's unexpected and provocative engagement with the DSK affair, focusing on her discussion of the idea of “credibility.” Firstly, we draw on Une société de violeurs and Belle et Bête in order to problematize Iacub's conception of the “credible victim.” Secondly, we discuss Christine Angot's strongly negative reaction to Belle et Bête, which poses the question of credibility in regards to female experience and the female literary voice. Considering that works by women are so often conflated with the personal lives of their authors, the debates to which they give rise are telling of how the notions of authorship and artistic value are defined and defended. The article aims to answer the following question: What are the social implications and political motivations of Iacub's writing and Angot's biting critique?

The Ladder by Alan Michael Parker

Reviewed by: The Ladder by Alan Michael Parker Leah Miranda Hughes Alan Michael Parker. The Ladder. Tupelo Press, 2016. Some literary voices hit a tone that can be identified by only a few words, like playing “Name That Tune” with just a few lines, and Alan Michael Parker projects one of those voices. From his distinctive gang of Vandals to sundry romances to verbal calculations, the poet manages a smart and frank philosophical voice throughout eight collections of poems. The Ladder, named the best book of 2016 in North Carolina with the NC Poetry Society’s notable Brock-Campbell Award, sounds as true to Parker as ever from the first note. The Ladder begins with the perfect epigraph, lines from Puccini’s poet Rudolfo in La Boheme: “What do I do? I write. And how do I live? I live.” A reader might view Parker’s collection with the opera in mind: a poor but happy, artistic life, the poet’s lover romantically dying in his arms, proving that art and love fill living with value. Parker begins the collection gathering the leaves of “this life the next life,” settling in to “Give a Little Talk on Singing.” This poem reveals a narrative philosophy that Parker and Puccini’s Rudolfo obviously share, for the poet, to write is to live. Illustrative of the struggle inherent in living (not to mention creating art), Parker’s narrator sings only begrudgingly. With a dry, discontented humor, the poems scan the horizon from offering prayers for daily living to making demands of God. What is enough? What to remember? What wishes to make? The collection gestures towards a potential reset at a midpoint as opposed to a midlife crisis. In the middle years of his life, the narrator of the title poem gets a grass sack “to start [a] new life.” Parker would use the ladder contained in his grass sack to “climb down from ambition.” Does the reader suppose that the speaker indicates a realization or expectation: To not expect so much? To descend from some height reached? To negotiate the expected anticlimax of a plot diagram in any given narrative? The Old Testament tells the story of Jacob’s Ladder: as Jacob flees for his life, his murderous brother Esau close on his heels, he dreams of a ladder that angels ascend and descend with God standing alongside. It is the gate to heaven. An old spiritual memorializes the story, one still sung as a hymn in the South today to remind the choir and congregation that “we are climbing…higher higher” everyday. In fact, Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie further popularized the song in folk music, bringing the Old Testament tale to a celebration of the steady daily human struggle of living in this world. [End Page 50] Through hair, X-rays, the moon, hotel rooms, and postcards, Alan Michael Parker also celebrates a person’s daily wrestling with life. With a keen eye on some inevitable end, the poems convey a sense of hope and home from the self-professed curmudgeonly singer. Parker brings clever diction and even more witty parallels, observations, and speculations to pull the extraordinary out of the ordinary. In each volume, Parker has an emotive house pet representing domestic love. In this collection, the dog misses “you,” an infamous use of second person, so much that he learns regretful, wistful, simple and sincere phrases in a multitude of foreign languages. These dogs and cats often extend gracious compassion, fetching the reader a heartbreaking moonful of amour or affection. Alan Michael Parker’s collection The Ladder keeps alive his distinctive voice over time. The poems convey honest statements with humor, yet, deepen in sincerity, with pretense or bluff stripped away for the reader to sit at the center of experiences such as burying a relative, going through the airport, taking a swim, turning 50. To illustrate, one of Parker’s speakers would steal a work of art, a Matisse representing hope, but not burn it to cover up the crime. Another speaker will ponder the eternal to come at peace with the ephemeral nature of a full head of hair. Such vulnerable honesty creates heartbreakingly beautiful poems...

Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film eds. by Julian Murphet, Helen Groth, and Penelope Hone

Reviewed by: Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film eds. by Julian Murphet, Helen Groth, and Penelope Hone Jennifer Janechek Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film. Edited by Julian Murphet, Helen Groth, and Penelope Hone. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Pp. 261. $105.00 (cloth). Well known for his aural literary aesthetic, Joseph Conrad insists in Notes on Life and Letters (1921) that "there is infinite variety in the noises books do make."1 But what kind of sounding is reading? And how does modernism dial up the stakes of that question? In "Modernist Sound-scapes and the Intelligent Ear: An Approach to Narrative Through Auditory Perception" (2005), Melba Cuddy-Keane captures the central problematic of literary sound studies—and indeed, the challenge faced by sonically attuned authors—when she writes that "narrative always faces the difficulty that as soon as sounds are put into words, we are left with the sound of the word, not the sound of the sound."2 Although literature does not sound directly, it is hardly silent, as scholars such as Cuddy-Keane, Garrett Stewart, Douglas Kahn, Steven Connor, Sam Halliday, and others have shown us. Stewart's famous distinction in Reading Voices (1990) between "hearing" and "listening" to literature—built on Roland Barthes's understanding of hearing as physiological and listening as psychological—has proven foundational for approaching questions of how [End Page 843] literature registers and reproduces the sonic texture of the world: "When we read to ourselves," Stewart explains, "our ears hear nothing. Where we read, however, we listen."3 Although many studies purport to "listen" to literary texts, they often fall short of doing so, or at least they fall into the worthwhile but limiting pattern of studying the metaphorical and mimetic representation of sound in writing. However, Julian Murphet, Helen Groth, and Penelope Hone's 2017 edited volume Sounding Modernism goes a long way toward establishing new and groundbreaking methodologies for analyzing sound in literature and film. Their focus, evident from the title, is on modern literature's capacities of sonic mediation, a burgeoning area of interest in modernist studies over the last decade and one heavily indebted to Cuddy-Keane's argument for a "new aurality" emerging in the first half of the twentieth century ("Modernist Soundscapes," 383). In her influential article, she contends that, largely owing to the invention of numerous sound technologies, there is a "distinctive new focus" across the modernist period on "the act of auditory perception," a focus reflected by a "perceptual turn" in narrative toward a heightened awareness of sound as both a material object and as something perceived (382). While many sound studies scholars have seized on this notion by exploring the unique ways in which modernist art represents both the new sounds of modernity and the newly materialized concept of sound, others, like Halliday in Sonic Modernity (2013), have cautioned against the tendency to approach the modernist phonotext as attempting to capture a distinctly modern soundscape.4 Halliday seems to advocate for the sort of "historiographic listening" theorized by Kahn in Noise, Water, Meat (1999)—a mode of listening that involves attending to the simultaneous presence of premodern and modern sounds and, in so doing, investigating the cultural history of sounds.5 In their Introduction, Murphet, Groth, and Hone reconcile both strains of scholarship by suggesting that "what 'sounds' in [modernist] literature … is the complex and negotiated passage of a newly materialised concept of sound itself across a number of competing institutions and media platforms, such that its ideological waves and radiation can be registered in a bewildering variety of discrete, even contradictory ways" (Sounding Modernism, 12). The essays in this collection—which examine the challenge of capturing modern sounds, the effects of vocal mediation, the modern literary voice's negotiation between sound and sense, and rhythmic mediation in modernist literature and film—attest to the manifold ways of reading sound in modern literature, all involving close-grained textual analyses that reveal the auditory dimension of written systems of signification. They resist the tendency, noted by David Trotter, to paint modernist aesthetic experimentation exclusively in terms of an agonistic relationship between literature and...

MATLIT v.5

To demonstrate through listening the aesthetic concept and practices described in my text essay, "Vox Media: Sound, 'under language,' and 'narrative archaeology' in/as Literature" also submitted for this special issue*. Recombining / reconceptualizing sound artifacts promotes broader opportunities for conceptualizing and creating literary artifacts characterized by audibility of text, sound as text and meaning, and heightened awareness of the author's/speaker's voice(s) in the text. Tensions produced by these combinations may help foreground conceptualizations and practices regarding sound-based texts. Specifically, these combinations of technologies and performances may help challenge the past invisibility of voice in literature and promote future digital media and textuality theory and practices more rewarding than simulacra, description, or transcription. Vox Media. Sound in/as literature. From something comes something more: electronic literature as sound-based narrative composed from sound poetry, text-sound composition, and/or sound art.&#x0D; &#x0D; *Editor's Note: Available here http://impactum-journals.uc.pt/matlit/article/view/3777/4162

Vox Media: Sound, "under language," and "narrative archaeology" in/as Literature

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; This essay describes (re)combining and/or (re)conceptualizing sound artifacts from two pioneering works of electronic literature no longer readily available to create a new, sound-based narrative for each work. The techne proposed promotes broader opportunities for conceptualizing and creating literary artifacts characterized by audibility of text, sound as text and meaning, and heightened awareness of the author’s and/or speaker’s voice(s) in the text. This approach may help challenge the past invisibility of voice in literature and promote practices more rewarding than simulacra, description, or transcription. Vox Media. Sound in and/or as literature.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;