Non-fiction Works Research Articles

Acclaimed Author Takes Readers Inside Physician's Life

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Annual MeetingFull AccessAcclaimed Author Takes Readers Inside Physician's LifeCatherine F. BrownCatherine F. BrownSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:17 Apr 2009https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.44.8.0034A physician with the skill and sensitivity to translate his compassion for the sick and suffering into deeply moving works of fiction and nonfiction is presenting this year's William C. Menninger Memorial Lecture at the Convocation of Fellows at APA's annual meeting next month in San Francisco. Credit: Joanne ChanAbraham Verghese, M.D., the author of My Own Country: A Doctor's Story and The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss, is a professor for the theory and practice of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and senior associate chair of the Department of Internal Medicine. His lecture is scheduled for Monday, May 18, at 5:30 p.m. in Hall E on the Exhibit Level of the Moscone Center.His newest book is also his first novel, Cutting for Stone, released earlier this year. It is the tale of Marion Stone and his identical twin brother, who were born from a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa in 1954. The story moves from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City over generations as Marion, who becomes a doctor, tries to come to terms with his past.Verghese was born in 1955 of parents who were from India and taught in Ethiopia. He completed his training at Madras Medical College and came to the United States for residency. In one of his early New Yorker articles,“ The Cowpath to America,” he described his experience as an international medical graduate who found only the less popular hospitals and communities open to him.From 1980 to 1983, he was a resident in Johnson City, Tenn., and then did a fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine. It was at Boston City Hospital where he saw the start of the HIV epidemic, and when he returned to Tennessee, he saw a second wave of the epidemic—in rural areas. He cared for numerous AIDS patients at a time when little could be done for them and helped them through early and painful deaths. His experience was transformative and became the basis for his first book, My Own Country. The book was one of five chosen as Best Book of the Year by Time magazine and later made into a movie.Verghese's interest in writing intensified, and he took time off from medicine to study at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Since then, in addition to the New Yorker and other publications, his work has appeared in Texas Monthly, Atlantic, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Granta, Forbes.com, and the Wall Street Journal.His next stop was the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in El Paso, Texas, where he was a professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases. During this time, he wrote another bestseller, The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss, about his friend and tennis partner's struggle with addiction. It won a “Notable Book” designation from the New York Times.“We are privileged, and I am delighted, to have Abraham Verghese, M.D., as our Convocation speaker for our May meeting,” said APA President Nada Stotland, M.D. “Dr. Verghese is an extraordinarily talented human being. I have been impressed by his insight, his persistence, his courage, and his writing since I read his first book, which describes his experiences as an international medical graduate caring for patients with AIDS in a small, southern town. He shares the experience of training, practicing, and living successfully in a country far from where he was born with the many APA members who treat American patients who might otherwise not have care. He brings to internal medicine the appreciation for doctor-patient communication that we psychiatrists nurture and cherish. Don't miss the opportunity to be enlightened and inspired by Abraham Verghese at the Convocation.”An interview of Verghese on NPR's “The Diane Rehm Show” is posted at<http://wamu.org/programs/dr/09/02/16.php#23625>.▪ ISSUES NewArchived

Lydia Maria Child

This article examines Lydia Maria Child's editorship of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the newspaper of the American Anti-Slavery Society, from 1841–43. Before becoming the editor, she edited her own magazine for children, worked with her husband at their newspaper, and wrote numerous fiction and nonfiction works for juveniles and adults. As an editor, she espoused objectivity, derided sensationalism, and applied her own inclusive formula for building circulation, emphasizing material with broad appeal to both men and women while reducing the emphasis on politics. She succeeded in doubling the Standard's circulation but did not satisfy the more strident members of the AASS, who wanted more militancy. She also introduced a popular personal column, “Letters to New-York,” which attracted wide attention.

No Marble Angels , and: The Dark Path to the River (review)

Reviewed by: No Marble Angels, and: The Dark Path to the River Logan D. Browning (bio) Joanne Leedom-Ackerman , No Marble Angels (1985; reprint Authors Guild Backinprint.com by iUniverse, 2008), 146 pp. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman , The Dark Path to the River (1987; reprint Authors Guild Backinprint.com by iUniverse, 2008), 390 pp. These two books, a collection of short stories and a novel, are in print again thanks to the good offices of the Authors Guild, which has developed a way through print-on-demand technology that "authors and their estates" may reissue in a quality paperback format "fiction and nonfiction works that were originally brought to the reading public by established United States publishers but have fallen out of print." The reappearance of these two well-regarded works by Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is [End Page 306] especially timely, each volume's in its own way. The collection No Marble Angels takes setting and time for most of its nine stories from southern cities at key moments in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s (e.g., Raleigh and Baltimore, 1968; Little Rock, 1956; Nashville, 1960). As the fortieth anniversaries of Martin Luther King's and Robert Kennedy's assassinations pass and an African American presidency has become a reality, recalling the turbulent early years of the struggle for civil rights helps to remind us simultaneously of how much progress has been made, and of how much more there needs to be. Though no African American female college student any longer need participate in a protest against lunch counter segregation, we need to be reminded of the tremendous psychological and physical cost of such activism to its participants, as one story here, "The Beginning of Violence," told from the point of view of a white Vanderbilt sorority girl who decides to write about a sit-in at a Nashville Woolworth's for the university paper, deftly accomplishes. The stories, whether focused on race or not, are told from a great number of perspectives: from that of the white Vanderbilt sorority reporter to that of a fat African American seventh-grade boy (both first-person narratives), and from that of a disaffected fourteen-year-old small-town Texas farm girl to that of a retired Jewish accountant who is a widower in New Jersey. The first three stories in the collection, apparently the most autobiographical, explore the consciousness of a young privileged well-educated white North Carolina woman named Shannon Douglas. She has attended college in the Northeast and at the end of the title story returns there for graduate school at Columbia before moving to Baltimore, the location of the collection's second and third stories. In each of the three, Douglas attempts to understand, bridge, and ameliorate the differences between herself and less materially well off, discriminated-against groups and individuals such as an African American maid's family and an illiterate impoverished African American woman with fiercely angry, deeply conflicted children. The collection's extraordinary variety of place, voice, and perspective, though handily managed in most instances, nevertheless ultimately left me with the feeling that I was reading an assemblage of experiments, of an author attempting to find a voice and a style of her own: at times we feel squarely in Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor territory (especially in the story "Sissy Mamma's Wig"), at others that of Anne Tyler (the Shannon Douglas stories) or of young John Updike or Philip Roth ("The Impostor" and "Death Stalks a Building Once It Enters"). In a collection well short of 200 pages, such ventriloquistic virtuosity results finally in an unsettled quality that distracts from the many strengths of these stories. My advice to readers of No Marble Angels would be to avoid reading it in a sitting; one or at most two stories at a time will allow for the necessary narrative reorientation. The reprinting of The Dark Path to the River is likewise timely. All one need do is be familiar with the latest news stories (at least as this is being [End Page 307] written) about Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and his hapless opposition, or the fumbling of the United Nations in...

What do you see?

This unit of non-fiction work is based on explanations of things the children have witnessed and listened to, as well as their own ideas and observations.

Humor and Healing in the Nonfiction Works of Jim Northrup

Humor and Healing in the Nonfiction Works of Jim Northrup Lawrence W. Gross (bio) Jim Northrup occupies a somewhat unique place among current-day Native American writers. His writings are well known, and he often travels to give readings. He continues to live, as much as is possible today, a traditional Anishinaabe life on the Fond du Lac Reservation in northern Minnesota. Northrup is best known for his work of fiction, Walking the Rez Road, a collection of short stories and poems loosely centered on the character of Luke Warmwater.1 Northrup has other writings as well. His memoir is entitled, The Rez Road Follies: Canoes, Casinos, Computers, and Birch Bark Baskets.2 He also publishes a nationally syndicated newspaper column, “Fond du Lac Follies.”3 From 1993 to 1995, he also published a monthly column on Native American issues in the Duluth News Tribune. To date, however, critical analysis of his work has only focused on Walking the Rez Road.4 I would like to amend this shortcoming by examining the nonfiction works of Northrup, paying special attention to the healing power of humor. It is my contention that Northrup’s writing can help us understand the process by which the comic vision is assisting the Anishinaabeg recover from the effects of postapocalypse stress syndrome.5 I will begin by providing a brief biography of Northrup’s life before explaining the comic vision of the Anishinaabeg and postapocalypse stress syndrome. [End Page 65] From there, I will present the negative aspects of Native American life, especially violence and inept tribal governments. In Northrup’s case, the violent side of life included a combat tour as a Marine infantryman in Vietnam. Life for Native Americans is not all bad, though, and the pleasant side of Native American life will be covered, too, including relatives, the seasonal cycles, and fighting for treaty rights. Finally, I discuss the role of storytelling and humor as a means of healing. As will be seen, the net effect is that Northrup’s writing illustrates how the Anishinaabeg are healing the wounds of their culture. Bio Graphical Look at Northrup Jim Northrup is now in his mid-60s, “almost an elder” as he likes to say.6 At this point in his career, he is a nationally recognized writer. Long before he acquired his current acclaim, however, Northrup was living an entirely different life. He grew up on the Fond du Lac Reservation, the oldest child in a family of thirteen. Like many Native American children of the period, he was sent off to boarding school, first to a federal school in Pipestone, Minnesota, and then to a Methodist-run school near Hot Springs, South Dakota. He got into trouble early in life for “aggravated buffoonery with intent to mope,” and also did a stint in reform school in Red Wing, Minnesota.7 His parole officer gave him two choices: He could finish high school or go back to Red Wing. His mother and father also wanted him to be the first person in the family to graduate from high school. He completed his secondary education and became one of the few Native Americans to graduate from high school in the state at the time. After graduating from high school, Northrup enlisted in the Marine Corps, and eventually did a tour of duty in Vietnam in a combat capacity. After returning to the United States, he worked for a time as a police officer, but he found the work too depressing and wound up leaving the profession. For a while he lived in a tepee in a somewhat remote part of the Fond du Lac Reservation, which is located near Duluth in northeastern Minnesota. It was while living there that his writing career began. When friends and family gathered in his tepee, one of their favorite pastimes was to tell stories. Northrup relates that he wanted to be prepared for these storytelling sessions and began writing notes to himself to get ready. He soon realized he had enough material to begin writing short stories. His collection of stories evolved into Walking the Rez Road.8 Becoming known as a writer was the genesis for his nonfiction...

Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (review)

Reviewed by: Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author Ezra Cappell Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, edited by Derek Parker Royal. Westport: Praeger, 2005. 303 pp. $39.95. Though Philip Roth’s American Pastoral only won runner-up honors in The New York Times recent poll of the best work of American fiction of the past twenty-five years (losing out to Toni Morrison’s Beloved), Roth was the only writer mentioned more than twice by the panel of contemporary critics and novelists who judged the contest; in fact, Roth made the list a stunning six times. As Derek Parker Royal says in his excellent introduction to a new essay collection, Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author: “Of all contemporary American writers, Philip Roth is arguably the most ambitious. Unlike many ageing novelists, whose productive qualities wane over time, Roth has demonstrated a unique ability not only to sustain his literary output but even to surpass the scope and talent inherent in his previous writings” (p. 2). As Royal suggests, Roth’s recent spate of major literary awards has created a “revitalization of Roth studies within academia” (p. 2). Royal counts a total of six books, dozens of journal articles and numerous doctoral dissertations devoted to Philip Roth in the past few years alone. However, recently more than the critics have been obsessed with Roth’s work; like Henry James appending critical prefaces to his novels, Roth has been attempting to beat critics at their own game by publishing many non-fiction works that analyze his compositional methods; in Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work and Reading Myself and Others, Roth attempts to codify criticism of himself. Adding to this recent trove of Roth material, the Library of America has already published three of a planned eight volumes of Roth’s collected works, ensuring that none of his work will go out of print anytime soon. Royal, who founded the Philip Roth Society and currently serves as the editor of the journal Philip Roth Studies, certainly manages to track all this renewed critical attention. New Perspectives contains a wealth of new information on this “American Author”; as a result, the volume will satisfy both the devoted Roth scholar and the casual reader interested in gaining a deeper understanding [End Page 149] of Roth’s work. Especially helpful to scholars is Royal’s comprehensive bibliography of all Rothiana, including those early uncollected essays and stories published years ago. The essays in Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author are arranged chronologically, following Roth’s career from its glorious beginning with Goodbye, Columbus up until his 2004 bestseller The Plot Against America. This organizing principle allows readers to revisit Roth’s lesser known works, i.e., Letting Go and When She Was Good. Living up to this book’s subtitle of “new perspectives on an American author,” Julie Husband convincingly argues that instead of thinking of these early works as failures or experiments which paved the way for his future success, these works might best be viewed as offering readers “an intriguing view of Roth’s struggle with second-wave feminism” (p. 25). Another strong point of this collection is that Royal has gathered a large and diverse group of contributors. Essays from established Jewish American literary critics, including Alan Cooper, Bonnie Lyons, and Elaine Safer (who has just published another excellent monograph on Philip Roth, Mocking the Age) sit side by side with younger critics eager to bring fresh critical perspectives to both Jewish American literature and to Philip Roth’s work. New Perspectives also moves beyond national borders in analyzing Roth’s fiction. Critics David Brauner and Margaret Smith bring an international flavor to their discussions of Roth novels. Speaking of the long monologue which is Portnoy’s Complaint, Brauner places Roth’s experimental novel in a European modernist context, suggesting that Alex Portnoy’s stream-of-consciousness narration should be seen in light of Roth’s interest in Joyce and Woolf and that “his preoccupation with bodily functions [is] an extension of those exhibited by the narrators of Joyce’s and D. H. Lawrence’s fiction; his guilt...

The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community , and: Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (review)

Reviewed by: The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, and: Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis Judy Rosenbaum (bio) The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. By Diana Pavlac Glyer. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007. Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis. By Michael Ward. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were the two best-known members of one of the most famous literary clubs of the twentieth century: the Inklings. This coterie of Oxford academics and other like-minded intellectuals met each week for decades to discuss their own fiction and nonfiction works in progress as well as other literature and ideas. The Inklings' knowledge of literature and language was vast. This was due partly to the rigorous humanities-based education customary in those days but also to the titanic intellects of these men. Most of them read Latin fluently; many knew ancient Greek and Old English. Several read Old Norse. Tolkien read Finnish and probably Hebrew. Many of the Inklings also had prodigious and detailed knowledge of every era of English literature as well as the writings of ancient Greece and Rome. Lewis, for example, was especially well known for his virtually photographic recall of literature. What a treasury for any authors to draw from! Certainly Lewis and Tolkien took full advantage of their own knowledge and the opportunity to share in the expertise of their colleagues. From these resources and their own fertile minds, they crafted immortal works: Lewis's Narnia books and the science fiction Perelandra trilogy; and Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Two recent scholarly books, one analyzing the Inklings and one studying Lewis, examine some of the ingredients that helped these two men shape their enduring works. The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community examines the very nature of literary cross-fertilization. As has been well known for decades, Lewis and Tolkien heard many of each other's writings-in-progress in Inklings meetings. The question is, Just how much, if at all, did Tolkien and Lewis actually influence each other's work? And did any other members [End Page 451] of the Inklings help to shape the masterworks produced by these two authors? Diana Pavlac Glyer deals with these issues in her engrossing book. Previous books such as Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings have also examined the group as a whole. From his research, Carpenter concluded that though there was much commonality in the Inklings' interests (Christianity and northern European mythology, for example), there wasn't much actual influence exerted by each Inkling author on the others' works. Glyer acknowledges that even some Inklings made this claim (she cites Lewis's wry remark that "No one ever influenced Tolkien—you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch"). However, she proposes that Inklings did indeed influence one another in various ways. She does not try to prove her case by citing parallel elements in their books because causation is difficult to prove and such elements may have originated from a common outside influence. Instead, Glyer analyzes the Inklings' works using a model explained in Karen Burke LeFevre's Invention as a Social Act. Applying this model, Glyer discusses roles that authors play to influence their fellow creators: resonator (giving oral or written encouragement), opponent (expressing disagreement, which can either discourage or reinforce another author's proposed direction), editor (making specific suggestions about text), collaborator (planning or writing a text with another author), and referent (being featured or mentioned in another author's writings). Glyer supports her position convincingly with a wealth of detail about all five role classifications (the fifth being a designation coined by Glyer herself). She cites a variety of writings by all the Inklings, not just Lewis and Tolkien, as well as other books of analysis, including Carpenter's. One persuasive example Glyer provides is a written exchange between Lewis and Tolkien about Tolkien's...

On the Contemporary Relevance of Elias Canetti’s Theory of Power

This article discusses Canetti’s theory of power in the context of what Derrida has recently described as political autoimmunity. Its first part differentiates Canetti’s approach from the postmodernism of Bernhard. A detailed textual analysis of Die Blendung is the subject of the middle part of this article. The concluding part of the paper shows the impact of both Canetti’s satirical style and his theory of death and power on the postmodernism of Jelinek. Jelinek develops and deepens Canetti’s critique of an evolutionary and progressive account of history by citing this discourse. By means of montage and bricolage she subjects an opposition between the rational and irrational, between the primitive and the civilized, to satirical treatment. Jelinek refers to Canetti’s Masse und Macht in order to demystify the ideologies that govern contemporary global societies. Her depiction of the ruler as the radical individual who practices self‐preservation turned wild and reduces everything that does not resemble him to nothingness clearly goes back to Canetti’s fictional and nonfictional work. Her work thus proves the contemporary relevance of Canetti’s analysis of power as death.

Walking: Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran

Walking:Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran Eamonn Wall Tim Robinson's Aran Island volumes, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986) and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth (1995) are two of the most celebrated texts to emerge from Ireland in recent decades, finding favor and garnering influence across numerous disciplines and readerships. Taken together, these companion volumes amount to an extraordinary and encyclopedic survey of Árainn Mhór, the largest of the Aran Islands, or Inishmore, as it is more popularly known. Robinson is an author possessed of diverse talents and interests, all of which are brought into play in Stones of Aran. A reader will be able to enter his work in a variety of ways. These might include—though should by no means be restricted to—such perspectives as cartography, cultural and physical geography, geology, languages, literatures in both Irish and English, colonialism and postcolonialism, ecology, the connection between Robinson's earlier life as an artist and his second calling as a cultural geographer and cartographer, and the space Robinson shares with his English contemporaries who have produced well-regarded explorations of regions beyond their homeland; in this later category, two that stand out are Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines (1987), set among the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, and Jonathan Raban's National Book Award-winning book on Montana, Bad Land (1996). Another approach to Robinson's oeuvre would be to read these works with a view toward how the act of walking figures in the Aran volumes. In each, the act of walking makes Robinson's adventure possible; governs his methodologies of discovery, and influences and underlines the literary forms present in his text. Here, William Least Heat-Moon's nonfiction work PrairyErth (1991) can provide a helpful context. It is a contemporary work from America that shares much with Stones of Aran, particularly in how it addresses issues related to language, place, and literary form. Inspired by Robert Flaherty's documentary film Man of Aran (1932), Robinson first came to Aran in the summer of 1972, and later settled on Inishmore with his partner for a number of years, during which he learned Irish and became part of island society. Before his arrival in Ireland, Robinson—who was born and raised in Yorkshire—had studied Mathematics at Cambridge and [End Page 66] worked as a visual artist and teacher in Istanbul, Vienna, and London. At the suggestion of the postmistress of Cill Mhuirbhigh, who had noticed his "hand for the drawing, an ear for placenames and legs for the boreens," Robinson set about drawing maps of the island that would be of use to visitors. Published in 1975, Robinson's first map found favor with both islanders and tourists alike, and began to bring him into contact with various experts who visited Inishmore and sought him out as a guide. From these experts and from his own readings, Robinson developed a deeper understanding of the complexity of the landscape of the island, and the ways it had been layered by the passing of time. These contacts drew him deeper into its dinnseanchas, or lore of place. The more he learned, the more the complexity of the island grew—and the more he doubted the simple tropes that underlined the functional maps he had drawn. Clearly, there was more to a place than its roads, buildings, hills, and so on. Each road, for example, was more nuanced and detailed than a mere line drawn between settlements. Landscapes, as he points out, "cannot themselves be shown or named"—for the minimal language of maps, not to mention the problematic nature of language, are never quite pliable enough to convey the ineffable spirit of place.1 He found as Melville had before him, that maps can conceal more than they reveal, "It's not down in any map; true places never are."2 To map Inishmore, or to "deep map" it, to borrow William Least Heat Moon's term, would require a larger narrative structure than could be provided by "simple" cartography.3 In this respect, Robinson had discovered the limits of maps in a way similar to that articulated by the American writer Barry Lopez in Desert Notes: Your confidence...

The beauty of the primitive: shamanism and the Western imagination

For the past forty years shamanism has drawn increasing attention among the general public and academics. There is an enormous literature on shamanism, but no one has tried to understand why and how Western intellectual and popular culture became so fascinated with the topic. Behind fictional and non-fictional works on shamanism, Andrei A. Znamenski uncovers an exciting story that mirrors changing Western attitudes toward the primitive. The Beauty of the Primitive explores how shamanism, an obscure word introduced by the eighteenth-century German explorers of Siberia, entered Western humanities and social sciences, and has now become a powerful idiom used by nature and pagan communities to situate their spiritual quests and anti-modernity sentiments. The major characters of The Beauty of the Primitive are past and present Western scholars, writers, explorers, and spiritual seekers with a variety of views on shamanism. Moving from Enlightenment and Romantic writers and Russian exile ethnographers to the anthropology of Franz Boas to Mircea Eliade and Carlos Castaneda, Znamenski details how the shamanism idiom was gradually transplanted from Siberia to the Native American scene and beyond. He also looks into the circumstances that prompted scholars and writers at first to marginalize shamanism as a mental disorder and then to recast it as high spiritual wisdom in the 1960s and the 1970s. Linking the growing interest in shamanism to the rise of anti-modernism in Western culture and intellectual life, Znamenski examines the role that anthropology, psychology, environmentalism, and Native Americana have played in the emergence of neo-shamanism. He discusses the sources that inspire Western neo-shamans and seeks to explain why lately many of these spiritual seekers have increasingly moved away from non-Western tradition to European folklore. A work of intellectual discovery, The Beauty of the Primitive shows how scholars, writers, and spiritual seekers shape their writings and experiences to suit contemporary cultural, ideological, and spiritual needs. With its interdisciplinary approach and engaging style, it promises to be the definitive account of this neglected strand of intellectual history.

The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis Hillary Chute (bio) In July 2004, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on graphic novels, speaking of them as a “new literary form” and asserting that comics are enjoying a “newfound respectability right now” because “comic books are what novels used to be—an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal.” However, this lengthy Times article virtually ignores graphic narrative work by women: the piece excerpts the work of four authors, all male; depicts seven authors in photographs, all male; and mentions women writers only in passing: “The graphic novel is a man’s world, by and large” (McGrath 2004, 24, 30). This is not true. Some of today’s most riveting feminist cultural production is in the form of accessible yet edgy graphic narratives.1 While this work has been largely ignored by feminist critics in the academy, interest is now growing from outside the field of comics, as we can see in recent essays in journals such as Life Writing, MELUS, Modern Fiction Studies, and PMLA.2 Feminist graphic narratives, experimental and accessible, will play an important role in defining feminisms that “could provide a model for a politically conscious yet post-avant-garde theory and practice” (Felski 2000, 187). I use “graphic narrative,” instead of the more common term “graphic novel,” because the most gripping works coming out now, from men and women alike, claim their own historicity—even as they work to destabilize standard narratives of history.3 Particularly, there is a significant yet diverse body of nonfiction graphic work that engages with the subject either in extremis or facing brutal experience. In much American women’s work, autobiographical investigations of childhood, the body, and (traumatic) sex—speciously understood as private, all-too-individual topoi— are a central focus. Yet whether or not the exploration of extremity takes place on a world-historical stage (as in, say, the [End Page 92] work of Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman), or on a stage understood as the private sphere (as in, say, the work of Alison Bechdel or Phoebe Gloeckner) should not affect how we understand these graphic narratives as political: the representation of memory and testimony, for example, key issues here, function in similar ways across a range of nonfiction work through the expansivity of the graphic narrative form, which makes the snaking lines of history forcefully legible. I am interested in bringing the medium of comics—its conventions, its violation of its conventions, what it does differently—to the forefront of conversations about the political, aesthetic, and ethical work of narrative. The field of graphic narrative brings certain constellations to the table: hybridity and autobiography, theorizing trauma in connection to the visual, textuality that takes the body seriously. I claim graphic narratives, as they exhibit these interests, “feminist,” even if they appear discrete from an explicitly feminist context. Further, I argue that the complex visualizations that many graphic narrative works undertake require a rethinking of the dominant tropes of unspeakability, invisibility, and inaudibility that have tended to characterize recent trauma theory—as well as a censorship-driven culture at large. Unquestionably attuned to the political, these works fundamentally turn on issues of the ethical, in Lynn Huffer’s important sense of the ethical question as “how can the other reappear at the site of her inscriptional effacement?” (2001, 3). I am interested in this notion of ethics as it applies to autobiographical graphic narrative: what does it mean for an author to literally reappear—in the form of a legible, drawn body on the page—at the site of her inscriptional effacement? Graphic narratives that bear witness to authors’ own traumas and those of others materially retrace inscriptional effacement; they reconstruct and repeat in order to counteract. It is useful to understand the retracing work of graphic narratives as ethical repetitions (of censored scenarios). In Sexuality and the Field of Vision Jacqueline Rose writes that the encounter between psychoanalysis and artistic practice draws its strength from “repetition as insistence, that is, the constant pressure of something hidden but not forgotten—something that can come into focus now by blurring the fields of representation where our...

Are Clones Really Different? Evidence From a Bildungsroman: Eva Hoffman's The Secret

The Secret is a first novel by Eva Hoffman, a Polish-American writer, better known for her non-fiction work, her memoir Lost in Translation and other writings which take her back to eastern Europe and the experiences of an earlier generation. It is set in a future USA where cloning is legal, though not acceptable to everyone, and the development of the narrative is largely guided by an implicit exposition of issues related to cloning. The Secret is a first person, chronological account in which many voices are heard, and these diverse voices contribute to a lively discussion within the text of the possible effects and implications of cloning for the clone, and for the clone’s family and friends.

Understanding Jamaica Kincaid

Understanding Jamaica Kincaid introduces readers to the prizewinning author best known for the novels Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of Mother. Justin D. Edwards surveys Jamaica Kincaid's life, career, and major works of fiction and nonfiction to identify and discuss her recurring interests in familial relations, Caribbean culture, and the aftermath of colonialism and exploitation. In addition to examining the haunting prose, rich detail, and personal insight that have brought Kincaid widespread praise, Edwards also identifies and analyzes the novelist's primary thematic concerns - the flow of power and the injustices faced by people undergoing social, economic, and political change. Edwards chronicles Kincaid's childhood in Antigua, her development as a writer, and her early journalistic work as published in the New Yorker and other magazines. In separate chapters he provides critical appraisals of Kincaid's early novels; her works of nonfiction, including My Brother and A Small Place; and her more recent novels, including Mr. Potter. Edwards discusses the way in which Kincaid both exposes the problems of colonization and neocolonization and warns her readers about the dire consequences of inequality in the era of globalization.

A Tribute to Tillie Olsen Dedicated to Joanne Trautmann Banks

A Tribute to Tillie Olsen Dedicated to Joanne Trautmann Banks Anne Hudson Jones (bio) Tillie Lerner Olsen was the second of six children born to Samuel and Ida Lerner, Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States. Born on a tenant farm in Nebraska, she was a worthy heir of her parent’s revolutionary heritage. In 1929, she left high school after the eleventh grade to begin working at a variety of low-paying jobs—hotel maid, packinghouse worker, linen checker, waitress, laundry worker, and secretary—in Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and California. She became an activist, a member of the Young Communist League, a labor organizer, and a prisoner after she was jailed for participating in the San Francisco general strike in 1934. She also became a wife, marrying Jack Olsen in the 1930s, and the mother of four daughters, Karla, Julie, Kathie, and Laura. Against the odds, she also became a writer. Although Olsen began writing Yonnondio: From the Thirties in the 1930s, the work was not published until 1974. “I Stand Here Ironing,” her first short story, was not published until 1955, when Olsen was forty-three years old. Tell Me a Riddle, her best-known collection of stories, was published in 1962, and Silences appeared in 1978. In Silences, a work of nonfiction, she writes of the forces that silence women, people of color, and the working poor and keep their voices from being heard in our literature. In her story “Tell Me a Riddle,” which won the O. Henry Award for Best American Short Story of 1961, it is the voice of the elderly woman patient, Eva, that is silenced. Olsen’s extraordinary talent and advocacy were eventually recognized, and she received many honors from such institutions as Stanford University (the Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the [End Page 281] Humanities, the City of San Francisco (Tillie Olsen Day in 1981) and the City of Santa Cruz (Tillie Olsen Day in 1998).1 I dedicate this memorial tribute to Tillie Olsen to Joanne Trautmann Banks, who died just four months after Olsen did, because the two women are forever linked in my mind through the article titled “Death Labors,” which Banks wrote for volume nine of Literature and Medicine in 1990.2 For that volume, a number of important works of literature and medicine had been selected by the issue editors, who then invited both a literary scholar and a physician to respond to each work, or set of works. In her piece, Banks was charged with writing about both Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych and Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle.” (Julia E. Connelly was the physician respondent to these same works.3) Banks’s basic thesis is that the two dying protagonists—Ivan Ilych and Eva, respectively—must break down the old forms of their earlier lives in exploration of their true identities as they answer the challenge of cancer and prepare for their deaths. Her more complex thesis is that in preparing for their deaths, the characters must repudiate the literary styles in which their own lives have been written, as the very different styles of Tolstoy and Olsen represent the very different ways in which Ivan and Eva have lived. “Forced to move to the rhythms of others” rather than her own,4 Eva has been so long silenced by the poverty and hard work required to rear her several children that Olsen presents her in fragments and elliptical utterances rather than in the well-formed linear sentences that Tolstoy uses to recount Ivan Ilych’s life. Olsen’s style for Eva is a woman’s style, capturing all the everyday interruptions of family duties that often prevent women from sustained intellectual work or writing. Olsen’s style in this story is difficult for some readers to follow, just as Eva’s style has become difficult for her family to understand. As she is dying, Eva’s death labor becomes the recalling of the revolutionary ideals of her youth in Russia, ideals that had originally grounded the love...

Critical companion to Ernest Hemingway: a literary reference to his life and work

Critical Companion to is an encyclopedic guide to the life and works of this great American writer. This book contains all the text of the acclaimed Ernest Hemingway A to Z, reorganized into a student-friendly format. Material new to this edition includes critical commentary of all Hemingway's novels and major short stories; further reading lists; an expanded biography; and new illustrations. This volume features entries on all of Hemingway's major and minor works, places and events related to his works, major figures in his life, and more. Appendixes include a complete list of Hemingway's works; a chronology; a genealogy; a unique map for readers of Islands in the Stream; a list of film, stage, and radio adaptations; and a bibliography of secondary sources. Coverage includes: an expanded biography of Hemingway; entries on all of Hemingway's works, major and minor; detailed synopses and critical commentary on his major novels, non-fiction works, and short stories; descriptions of major characters; discussions of important people in Hemingway's life; analyses of the culture, times, and places in which Hemingway lived and wrote; and, helpful bibliographies and a chronology of Hemingway's life.

Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity (review)

Reviewed by: Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity Michelle Ann Abate (bio) Anja Müller, ed. Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2006. xiii+243pp. US$94.95;£47.50. ISBN 978-0-7546-5509-1. The eighteenth century was arguably the most influential period in the development of modern Western conceptions of "the child" and the cultural notion of "childhood." As Philippe Ariès famously asserted in his seminal study L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime , this era marked the beginning of societal recognition of childhood as a distinct phase of physical and psychological development. For the first time, adults in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States saw children as embodying a distinct familial role and, thus, separate societal designation. In an oft-mentioned but nonetheless powerful illustration of this phenomenon, the [End Page 477] long eighteenth century witnessed the publication of two works on children and childhood that have remained among the most influential to this day: John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Émile (1762). A new collection of essays edited by Anja Müller spotlights this historically rich and culturally influential era. Fashioning Childhood simultaneously builds on previous work regarding the crystallization of childhood during the eighteenth century and questions some of the most long-standing and seemingly "sacrosanct" viewpoints, including those posited by Ariès. The volume contains an impressive seventeen essays, with an opening commentary by Müller. Not surprisingly, given the volume's title, one of the underlying assumptions or overarching premises of the various chapters is the notion that the emergence of childhood during the long eighteenth century did not occur organically but instead was deliberately constructed. For this reason, as Müller asserts, the essays in the volume are "less interested in the character of this construct as such but look into the processes generating the respective concepts" (3). With this premise serving as its starting point, each chapter seeks to explore and explode the history of childhood during the long eighteenth century from a variety of theoretical perspectives, cultural contexts, and academic disciplines. Whereas previous studies addressing the crystallization of modern Western notions of childhood have largely concentrated on individual nations in general and privileged American and British contexts in particular, Fashioning Childhood concentrates on Anglo-European literature and culture. The list of contributors includes scholars from Germany, France, England, and the United States, whose work engages fields as varied as art history, literary criticism, medicine, modern languages, the history of science, leisure culture, psychology, and the law. In this way, Fashioning Childhood unites many formerly disparate aspects of Anglo-European studies about the eighteenth century. While such a broad approach carries with it the potential to make the collection unfocused and even scattershot, Fashioning Childhood works well as a cohesive entity. The chapters complement rather than contradict each other, often demonstrating cultural studies at its best. Among the topics discussed in the collection are the role of children in the era's burgeoning leisure culture, early psychological discourses about the treatment of mentally troubled youth, transformations in children's portraiture, changing theories about the medicalization of infants and toddlers, the child as both a consumer and a producer of art, and the representation of children and childhood in works of fiction and nonfiction. As even this brief sampling suggests, Fashioning Childhood contains as much intellectual depth as it does interdisciplinary breadth. [End Page 478] While nearly every essay in the collection is well written and compellingly argued, I was especially impressed with Adriana S. Benzaquén's opening article, which examines medical advice books for parents. Many of these treatises tout the importance of raising children "according to nature," but, as Benzaquén aptly notes, they also assert that "the means to follow the path of nature was to heed the advice of science" (21). Similarly, Uwe Böker's essay on the Newgate Calendars and the way in which notions of juvenile delinquency emerged in tandem with concepts of childhood offers much intellectual food for thought. Especially for readers who may not be specialists in the eighteenth...

Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Biographers, and Accumulators of "Erotica" (review)

Reviewed by: Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Biographers, and Accumulators of “Erotica” Kris Somerville Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Biographers, and Accumulators of “Erotica” By Geoff NicholsonSimon & Schuster, 2006, 274 pp., $25 In British author Geoff Nicholson's 1991 darkly comic novel, Hunters and Gatherers, Steve Geddes is commissioned to write a book about obsessive collectors and in doing so encounters several eccentric personalities. Nicholson revisits the theme of accumulation and obsession in Sex Collectors, a work of nonfiction that promises to take us deep into the underground world of eccentric artists and serious collectors of erotica. One of the collectors Nicholson meets is Eric Danville, a collector of Linda Lovelace memorabilia and manager of the former porn star's comeback. It is eerie that much of what he owns Linda never knew existed, making her feel as if her collector knows more about her than she does. There is Naomi Wilzig, a sixty-nine-year-old Jewish widow and grandmother who plans to open her own sex museum to display her erotic bric-a-brac, insured for $5 million. Her inventory is mostly silly and tacky: Pinocchio with a penis for a nose, an Asian female puppet with strings attached to her breasts, wooden pigs having sex in the missionary position. Nicholson also visits seventy-one-year-old Dixie Evans, the former "Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque," curator of a museum that maintains the shrines of legends Betty Page, Josephine Baker, Blaze Starr and Sally Rand. And let's not forget the former rock-star groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster, who has been making plaster penis replicas for thirty years. Of the seventy-one samples in her collection, that of Jimi Hendrix is the most famous—and largest. Surprisingly, there is nothing that titillating about any of these collections or their owners. As a writer of nonfiction, Nicholson is tied to the truth of his discoveries and admirably resists invention or exaggeration. Mostly, Sex Collectors is a casual, rambling memoir of his frustrating search for these fabled collectors. As "eccentric personalities" they are almost all disappointing. Several have mundane attitudes towards their "obsessions" and are surprisingly uninterested in telling about how they got started collecting or contemplating where it might end. In fact, too many of them are reluctant to call themselves collectors at all. One wishes that Nicholson was a more skillful interviewer. During his meeting with Catherine Millet, the art critic and French author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M, the conversation is one dead end after another. Millet insists that [End Page 153] she didn't collect men but simply preferred anonymous sex. In fact, she tells him, she's never understood the collecting compulsion. Nicholson himself denies membership among the obsessed, yet he comes to the obvious realization that he has become a collector of collectors. But why bother? What need does collecting satisfy? It is a question one wishes Nicholson would try to answer, but he seems as inarticulate on the subject as his interviewees. We are left with the question posed in Hunters and Gatherers: "What was collecting anyway? You took one thing and you took another thing, you put them next to each other and somehow their proximity was to create meaning. You put certain artifacts together, drew an artificial boundary around them, and there you were with a collection. So what?" Unfortunately, this time around, the reader of Sex Collectors is left asking the same question. Copyright © 2007 The Curators of the University of Missouri

Children’s Literature Reviews: 2006 Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts

The Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts committee is charged each year with selecting 30 notable titles that teachers can use in teaching the language arts—writing, reading, speaking, listening, visually representing, or viewing. Books the committee considers for this annual list are written for children, grades K–8, and include works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, picture storybooks, and books featuring word play. Even wordless books are eligible. The books must have been published within the previous copyright year (2005 for the current list).

Vertov After Manovich

Étudier Dziga Vertov c'est le ré-inventer: comme icône de la réforme au cours du « dégel » de la période Khrouchtchev; comme précurseur du cinéma vérité; comme incarnation du constructivisme soviétique; comme porte-étendard du cinéma politique; comme illustration des contradictions internes de la révolution soviétique; comme pilier de l'avant garde. Pour sa part, Lev Manovich, dans The Language of New Media, confère à L'homme à la caméra de Vertov le statut d'antécédent des médias digitaux, ayant engendré tous les concepts qui allaient façonner les nouvelles technologies. Cet article propose de renverser la filiation établie par Manovich et d’utiliser le « langage des nouveaux médias » pour mieux comprendre l'œeuvre de Vertov.

The Occult Novels of Dion Fortune

Dion Fortune and her group, the Fraternity of the Inner Light (now the Society of the Inner Light), wrote and performed rituals, beginning in the 1930s, with the intention of reviving goddess worship and feminist spirituality. Today's goddess-centered practitioners owe much to Fortune's pioneering efforts. Although Fortune disavowed direct political action, she worked spiritually to empower women and lived the life of a liberated woman through her religious activities and beliefs. Dion Fortune is one of the most important occultists of the first half of the twentieth century. She has produced a sizable corpus of non-fiction works on both practical and theoretical occultism and has written novels that are still in publication and have an active readership.