Imagination Of Writers Research Articles

The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton by Graham Hammill

Graham Hammill. The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. xii + 328 pages. $50.00.Reviewed by Daniel Juan GilGraham Hammill has written an impressive study of political theology early modern England. His book is distinguished by its ambition and range, and by its scholarly and intellectual depth. At its core lie three brilliant chapters that offer an original and persuasive understanding of political theology Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Harrington. Hammill goes on to explore the impact of his distinctive account of political theology on Marlowe, Drayton, Marvell, and Milton.The common thread that runs through Hammill's wide-ranging book is his interest what the story of Moses giving laws to the Israelites meant to political and imaginative writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This story seems to foreground the complex nexus between theology and an emerging notion of a secular political sphere. On the one hand, the story of Moses seems to be about instituting a political form of government that breaks with the political theology of the Egyptians which pharaoh is both a king and a god. On the other hand, though, the basis for Moses's lawgiving is his claim to being the recipient of divine revelation, and his political authority is supposedly backed by divine will. For Hammill, its very doubleness, the Moses story shows how secular political orders seem to require what he usefully terms a supplement, an explicit or implicit claim that the political community is called into existence by God. This theological to political structures can provide the binding authority that compels obedience; equally importantly, the theological can redefine political opponents as theological enemies and empower the state to use spectacular violence to protect itself. Hammill explores the way explicitly theological claims haunt early modern ideas about the nature and structure of political life. But Hammill also claims that the Mosaic moment opens the door to the notion that self-consciously literary texts can also generate myths or fictions that can function as the supplement that these political orders need. Thus Hammill writes, in binding the secular state to interpretations of Hebrew scripture, sixteenth-and seventeenth-century writers also bind a political theology of creation to literary creation and imagination. While the Mosaic constitution raises the problem of a constituting power that exists outside the bounds of normative law, Hebrew scripture locates that power more specifically the persuasive capacities of metaphor and narrative to life through belief (8). Exploring the ways self-consciously literary texts can themselves shape life through belief is the focus of the second half of the book.Hammill begins his book with a chapter on Machiavelli that is striking for its force and clarity. From the Moses story Machiavelli draws the lesson that rulers should make use of religious claims to legitimate their power and forestall opposition. Implicitly, at least, Machiavelli understood scripture as nothing more than an unusually powerful and effective rhetorical reservoir that a new prince can mobilize to serve his interests. Machiavelli advises the prince to use religion to buttress his political power and demonize his enemies and therefore to authorize spectacular violence to silence dissent. But, fascinatingly, Hammill argues that Machiavelli's instrumental use of religion foregrounds the importance of belief (and therefore imagination) political life, thus opening the door for an examination of the ways nonreligious texts can also manipulate imagination and compel belief politically effective ways. That idea will turn out to play an important role the chapters devoted to literary texts. But the first half of the book, Hammill suggests that Machiavelli's understanding of religion as nothing but an imaginative and rhetorical reservoir also opens the door to a more utopian understanding of the role of specifically religious discourse political life. …

An Ideal City. Kate O’Brien and Rome

What was Kate O’Brien’s ideal of Rome and how did the eternal city influence her imagination? In this essay I want to provide a context for the Italian travel writings of the Irish novelist Kate O’Brien, published in the late 1950s and early 1960s in various journals and magazines and reproduced here. I suggest that context by arguing that Rome provided O’Brien with a vital source of inspiration and a new departure as a novelist at a time of some difficulty in her writing life. Born in Limerick in 1897, Kate O’Brien spent most of her writing career in London from the early 1930s onwards, publishing popular novels and working as a reviewer, broadcaster and travel writer. After a brief marriage, she lived the rest of her life in relationships with other women. Her novels, although accessible and widely read, also featured radical and subversive representations of lesbian and gay sexuality at a time of criminalisation and marginality for the sexually other. For this reason, two of her novels, Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941), were banned in Ireland for obscenity. Despite this banning and subsequent negative public discussion of her work, O’Brien left London and returned to live in Ireland in the early 1950s. She settled in Roundstone, Co. Galway where she bought a large house and continued to write her novels and essays. However, by the mid 1950s, her inspiration appeared to be flagging as she struggled to complete what was to be her final novel, As Music and Splendour (1958). The expense of maintaining a large house on her free-lance earnings also became a problem for her and a trip to Italy was a solution, as a place to escape her money problems and to try and locate a new source of inspiration for her novel. As a young woman, she had lived in Spain and two of her novels had Spanish settings but, now for the first time, in the late 1950s, Italy became the location for her imaginative and critical writings and with fruitful results. Rome was to aid her in the creation of her most radical and progressive novel.

The Ecopoetics of Charles Harpur

Ecopoetics has to do with the realisation of the relationship between human beings and the biosphere. It reflects on what it might mean to dwell with the earth. Before one's country can become accepted as a dwellilng place for the writer's imagination, it must first be discerned, experienced, expressed, and as it were fully engaged. The foreignness of the Australian environment as envisaged by the early European settlers, together with the exploitive ideology of colonialism, proved challenging for colonial writers such as Charles Harpur who felt a sense of connection to the place.This paper examines Harpur's work to determine if it qualifies as ecopoetics as understood in recent studies of literature in relation to the environment. It also seeks to establish his work as a resource for current environmental thinkers, as a point of reference for the consideration of the pre-colonial communicative exchange with this land. His emphasis is on vision: both in a temporal and a transcendental sense.

Urbanism and Architecture in the Journalistic Work of G. Călinescu, Writer and Social Observer

Călinescu, a Romanian writer, critic, literary historian and publicist, a multilateral personality of classic orientation, has a long, continued and high-class publishing activity, for 45 years (1920-1965), in over 30 prestigious literary publications. The publicist is a sober technician; he motivates the man into a scenery of order, he approaches with interpretive amplitude the idea of architecture, monumental, civic, architectural and cultural heritage, the traditional identity axis. In his novels and articles, he describes competently the old Romanian towns full of architectural history, highlighting the Greek and Latin harmony of the monuments, building visionary new cities (especially the capital Bucharest) according to new artistic rules and draws accurate scientific sketches. The paper proposes an analysis of these articles and writings of the past in order to prove the timeliness of the writer's vision regarding the importance of preserving the heritage of the Romanian architectural landscape designed in modernity.

Reading Clothes: Literary Dress in William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell

The expression derives from The Fashion System, Roland Barthes's 1967 study of the relationship between visual images and verbal accounts of clothes in fashion magazines. Although Barthes acknowledges the significance of descriptions of dress in literature proper, he excludes them from this semiotic study as fragmentary, too variable historically to be of use (10). However, such descriptions have since proved increasingly fascinating to literary scholars and critics. Less concerned than Barthes with a totalizing interpretive system, they have gradually begun to study the ways imaginative writers have mediated the complex and shifting codes of clothing through the complicated language of fiction. Indeed, the inconsistencies and variations of imagined dress that make it less than suitable for Barthes are central to its allure for the critic. The tenuous relationship of imagined dress to real, visually recognizable garments makes it--like the entire realm of fiction--both a valuable and a treacherous field of information, equally tantalizing to antiquarians seeking evidence and indeterminists justifying uncertainty. The intimate and artful relationship of clothing to literary characters renders it a medium of social reproduction and, contrarily, of self-fashioning. It is a minimalist literary trope tailored for maximum versatility. Literary dress is paradoxical and complex but also utterly commonplace. Its ubiquity and familiarity permit it to hide in plain sight, part of the everyday trappings of fiction, signifying copiously yet evading ostentation, the resonance of dress has pervaded fiction since the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century. The development of the novel coincided with social and economic transformations that encouraged ideals of selfhood among people and permitted unprecedented choices in their manner of clothing themselves. Dress acquired loquacity because it was no longer a fixed arbiter of rank but a variable sign of individuality as well as condition (Styles 16). Dress offered novelists density of social context while concurrently suggesting metonymic and metaphorical relationships between characters and ideas. From the beginning, fictions of dress enabled authors to speculate, in advance of more formal theories, about determinism and freedom, social construction and human agency, the adaptability and autonomy of the imagination, and the power of language to create novelty from the commonplace. One of the first critics to identify literary dress as a site for exploring this link between the familiar and the extraordinary in fiction was Carey McIntosh. In her pioneering article, Clothes, she distinguishes between ordinary clothes-consciousness, which satisfies the need for materiality and spectacle, and the functional potency of clothing, which provides clues to character, drives the plot, reveals values, and creates patterns of allusion (81). McIntosh also implies that one of the additional reasons literary dress is so intriguing is that these and potently extraordinary functions are inseparable rather than distinct. Merely naming some items of dress can have a powerful psychic impact: thus women's corsets, shifts, and stockings became literal unmentionables in early novels. Then the word unmentionable itself acquired the taboo suggestiveness of the intimate garments. The writer and reader of literary dress must register its private, psychic effects, recognize its public, social significance, and simultaneously contemplate new meanings derived from its linguistic mediation. The literary experience nurtures and rewards such multiple literacies and indeed McIntosh's early work on written clothes has received a rich critical elaboration, first in English and later in American literary studies. In the four decades since McIntosh first looked into Pamela's wardrobe, literary dress studies have expanded backward to the Renaissance and Middle Ages and forward to the futurist couture of aliens, robots, and cyborgs. …

Hidden Images of Christ in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis acutely conscious of the hiddenness of God, of the inexhaustible mystery of the Divine, according to Kallistos Ware, Bishop of Diokleia and the Spalding Lecturer in Orthodox Studies at Oxford University. It is an awareness Lewis held in common with the Orthodox tradition (God 56). Although Lewis's apologetic works, Ware continues, with their almost overconfident reliance on reason and moral law, are cataphatic in tenor, an apophatic side is evident in his imaginative writings. (1) Michael Ward argues that Ware's insight is applicable to Lewis's general theological vision, his continual emphasis on God's unperceived omnipresence and proximity: major feature of his spirituality is the exercising of Enjoyment consciousness in order to experience that divinity (Planet 227). This paper will build on those comments and show that a subtle mixture of hiddenness and revelation is characteristic of Lewis's imaging of Christ in his major fiction--the Space Trilogy, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Till We Have Faces. Such a hidden approach is apparent in Lewis's earliest work of fiction, Out of the Silent Planet, published in 1938. Hiding the Christian references was easier then than it was later in Lewis's career. Today Lewis is well known as one of the twentieth century's leading defenders of the Christian faith, and readers expect to find, and thus look for, Christian themes in his fiction. But that was not the case in 1938. At that point his name would have been recognized only by literary scholars. They knew it because of the recent publication of a brilliant study of the courtly love tradition, The Allegory of Love. That book, and a half-dozen scholarly articles, marked Lewis as a leading figure in the post-war generation of literary scholars. The only other things he had published at that point were three books with very low sales figures: a collection of war poems entitled Spirits in Bondage; a long narrative poem, Dymer (both published under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton--his own first name and his mother's maiden name); and a rather strange work entitled The Pilgrim's Regress, which is an allegorical account of his sojourns as an agnostic (he said atheist) in his teens and twenties, and his journey back to the Christian faith, which culminated in 1931. It is now evident from The Pilgrim's Regress that Lewis had begun using his writing skills in support of the faith to which he had returned, but readers then would not be aware of this. In Out of the Silent Planet, a middle-aged professor, Elwin Ransom, who reminds the reader of both Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, is kidnapped by a scientist and an adventurer (Edward Rolles Weston and Richard Devine), and taken with them on a space vehicle to Mars (though called by its Old Solar name, Malacandra, in the novel). The flight is a journey into experience and self-knowledge for Ransom as he learns, for example, that space is not cold, empty, and barren, but is pulsating with light and spiritual life. After arriving on Malacandra, he escapes from his captors and spends several months living with the hrossa, the poets and musicians of the planet: rational, gentle, charitable creatures. They live in perfect peace and cooperativeness with two other rational species, the sorns (scientists and philosophers) and the pfifltriggi (craftsmen and artists). From the hrossa and sorns, Ransom learns about the spiritual beings who look after Malacandra. Each planet in the solar system has a guardian angel called Oyarsa, who is served by numberless lesser angels called eldils. But the Oyarsas are not the supreme spiritual beings. When Ransom asks the hrossa if the Malacandrian Oyarsa had the planet, their answer is the first example of Lewis providing an image of Christ that simultaneously reveals and conceals: Did people in Thulcandra [Earth] not know that Maleldil the Young had and still ruled the world? (106). For readers familiar with the Bible, this passage clearly betrays that Maleldil the Young is the Malacadrian name for Christ, the second person of the Trinity, who is creator and ruler of Earth: Through him all things were made; without him nothing was that has been made (John 1. …

The Way Ahead: The Teaching of Hyper-narrative at Bournemouth University

Interactive, multi-media storytelling continues to excite the imagination of writers and visual artists, and yet still has not crossed from academia and the artistic avant-garde into mainstream consciousness. Considering the possibilities for creative expression and for wonderful reading experiences, it is still surprising that ‘hyper-narrative’ is so unknown. Unless something changes in the way writers and readers gain access to hyper-narrative, both as an expressive means and an entertainment, then hyper-literature (as opposed to narrative gaming, which of course has become hugely commercially successful) might well remain in its current backwater. This paper aims to help enhance the visibility of hyper-narrative by developing the teaching of it to creative writers, who are interested in the form but nervous of sophisticated multi-media writing and design tools. The paper therefore first offers a guide to creating stories that incorporate multi-media and interactivity. It then describes a software package, created by the author of this paper, which can be used to enable non-web-specialist writers to easily create interactive narratives – the Genarrator platform is a dedicated digital writing and design program which also hosts the finished pieces. The paper then outlines an approach to the teaching of hyper-narrative. Overall, the paper offers writers and teachers engaging ways to approach creative writing in new-media.

Ambergris and Early Modern Languages of Scent

This paper examines the cultural, scientific and poetic life of ambergris in the seventeenth century, in the context of contemporary theories about smell, and changing attitudes to style and expression. Most widely used as an ingredient in perfumery, this mysterious substance (now known to be the pathological secretion of a sperm whale) attracted significant interest: natural philosophers speculated on its origin, and imaginative writers used it as a trope for the exotic and the powerfully ephemeral. In surveying the appearance of ambergris in natural philosophical writings (including the proceedings of the Royal Society, and works by Browne and Boyle), as well as in botanical treatises, recipe books, travellers’ narratives, and lyric poetry, this paper seeks to recover a sense of the forgotten olfactory codings of the past. It ends with an attempt to place ambergris within the highly nuanced vocabulary of scent employed by Robert Herrick, the most distinguished nose of the early modern age.

Brain-computer interfacing: science fiction has come true

The image of the person condemned to an inner existence of unimaginable torment through paralysis or inability to communicate despite sentience has resonated in the imagination of writers, philosophers, physicians and scientists, free to move and exchange their own ideas, down the ages; but the tantalizing idea that silent thoughts and intentions might be translated into action using extrinsic mechanical forces has seemed to lie in the realm of pure science fiction. Controlling machines and influencing one’s environment simply by thought was once the stuff of which dreams were made. Accordingly, in the early 1980s, Captain Pike—one of the protagonists of Star Trek—although completely paralysed, controlled his wheelchair with his brain. A blinking light flashed once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no’ (www.trekkiesworld.de). Remarkably, however, new technology can now, at least to some extent, restore the basics of motor control and communication to people severely disabled by neurological disease or traumatic injury. There has been an expansion of research published recently on brain–computer interface and this has led to real advancements in assistive and therapeutic applications. BRAIN COMPUTER INTERFACES. PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE By Jonathan R. Wolpaw and Elizabeth Winter Wolpaw Eds. 2011. New York: Oxford University Press USA and Oxford: Oxford University Press ISBN: 978-0-19-538885-5 Price: $115.00/£85.00 Five years after the publication of Towards brain-computer interfacing (Dornhege et al. , 2007), the more recent volume on Brain computer interfaces. Principles and practice demonstrates the maturation of this field. Edited by Jonathan Wolpaw and Elizabeth Winter Wolpaw, this book describes the exponential growth in brain–computer interface research that started in the early 1990s with around one publication per year, expanding after 1995 and reaching 470 between 2008–10, so that we can expect at least 700 publications on this topic for 2011 until the end of 2013. And yet in this period, …

Three Stories—And a Writer's Tale: A Creative Writing Case Study of Workplace Bullying

I present a creative writing case study of workplace bullying using three stories: Story 1—The Writing Context contextualizes the case study's development in an Australian higher education institution; Story 2—The Writing Process describes the creative writing process, including interpretation of public domain secondary empirical sources enmeshed with a writer's imagination; and Story 3—The Writing Product presents a creative writing case study of workplace bullying. Interleaved with these three stories of context, process, and product are fragments of my more reflective and reflexive story—A Writer's Tale—shared to assist reader understanding of some of the ambiguous, paradoxical, and pernicious outcomes of workplace bullying, while also offering insights into the challenges facing those choosing to use creative writing in their scholarly work.

Satanic Indifference and Ultimate Reality

Satan has captured the imagination of writers in the English language for centuries. This figure and the notion of evil have gone through many changes in English literature of the 19 and 20 centuries. Something changed Satan during this time, and made him into an arbiter of truth rather than a figure of rebellion. In The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain used him as the grand narrator of the universe who explains the truth of all existence, that life an illusion. The American horror author H.P. Lovecraft carried this one step further, using Rudolf Otto's mysterium horrendum to divest Satan of his supernatural status. Satan was transformed from a symbol of evil in a Manichean universe to an articulate arbiter of the revelation that human existence means nothing cast against the broad spectrum of the cosmos. There are many vantage points from which to examine a subject like Satan. To paraphrase Mark Twain's comments about man, Satan is too large a subject to be treated as a whole; so this paper will merely discuss a detail or two of him at this time.” There are many platitudes about Satan that have been as grossly misunderstood as his legacy. The most interesting comes from Percy Shelley: “Depend upon it, that when a person once begins to think that perhaps there no Devil, he in a dangerous way.” (Shelley 1965, 87) At first glance, this appears to be similar to the statement in Charles Baudelaire's “The Generous Gambler,” that “the devil's slickest trick to convince you that he does not exist!”(Baudelaire 1991, 407) Shelley seems to state that the Devil a real force in the world, and if one to deny this force's existence, one in danger of falling into sin. However, Shelley's “On the Devil and Devils,”—from which this statement taken—presents a rebuke of the Christian religion, invoking the Devil in order to explain how a Manichean universe—one with a Devil—could justify and give greater moral agency to the Devil than to God. This a call to understand that—in the religious mindset—if there good, perhaps there evil. Baudelaire's story takes this a step further and presents the Devil not as this necessary force, but as a freethinker and explicator of truth. The narrator, a preacher relates: This paper will be using the word “Satanic,” as it originally means—adversarial. An illuminating article, “The Doctrine of Satan I: The Old Testament” by William Caldwell puts this in perspective. The word Satan, he states “often used in the Old Testament as a verb, meaning to be or act as an adversary. Satan as a noun means a human adversary” or a “superhuman adversary.” According to Caldwell, “[. . . ]it appears as though these adversaries are[ . . . ]only functionally separate from God.” He further states that “angels that have evil tasks are not themselves thereby evil,” Moreover, “the Book of Job” mentions “one of the 'sons of God,' or angels, called Satan or Adversary. Anything like a clear outline of Satan appears here for the first time in the Old Testament. But even here it the Satan. The presence of the article denotes the function of adversary rather than a character personally adverse to the good.” In The Biblical World 41.1 (1913): pg. 32 1 Reis: Satanic Indifference and Ultimate Reality

Marshall McLuhan's mosaic: probing the literary origins of media studies

Acknowledgments Prologue 'April is the cruellest month ...' Look Backward, Enquire Farther 1. A Renewed Approach to Marshall McLuhan's Poetics From Figure to Ground What Was THAT? McLuhan's 'Little Point' Pointing to Action: This Book Digging the Ground Hey, Marshall McLuhan, What Were You Doin'? Oh, What a Seer He Was! The Electric/Eclectic Humanist Learning the Grammar Post-literate 'Paideia' From Integral Awareness to Storytelling PART ONE: THE MOSAIC 2. Towards Post-Secondary Orality: The Mosaic Embodying McLuhan Casting the Hybrid Substantial Discontinuity What's in a Probe? Playing with Form Render Not Narrate McLuhan's Interactive Mosaic or Post-Secondary Orality 3. Thus Spoke the Oracle Oracular Pronouncements Interfacing Orality and Literacy Performative Storytelling 4. Let the Guru Resound The Gurus' Guru Redefining Space Holistic Mosaic: Western Science, Eastern Philosophies Touch-A Touch-A Touch the Guru 5. A Conscious Modernist Craftsman A Pioneer of (New) Modernist Studies Universal Quest, Fragmented Rendering To Make You Feel: Probing through Language 6. The Hyper-Language of the Media 'Fan' Media Fan or Grammarian of Media? Hypertexting the Mosaic De-hypertexting the Mosaic Electrifying Hybrid PART TWO: MODERNIST ASCENDANCIES 7. McLuhan and Media Studies Labelling the Media Theorist Evolutionary Grammarian A Political Thomist A Classic Modernist 8. From Literature to Media Studies Conscious Planning Practical Mystics From Renaissance to Modernism On a Mission 9. Ford Madox Ford: 'Not Mere Chat' Literature Matters An Imaginative Writer Things, Not Words Comparing Strategies Rendering Change Ford's The Fifth Queen: Probing the Making of the Gutenberg Galaxy 10. James Joyce: Vivisecting Society Applied Joyce Sci-Fi Phantasmagoria Grotesque Vivisection Newspaperwise Attack 11. Ezra Pound: Pursuing Persuasion, Translating Cultures Epical News From Old to New Learning 196 (Ideo)Grammatic Baedeker Totalitarian Craft? 12. Wyndham Lewis: Blasting Time, Blessing Space A Proto-postmodernist From Time to Space Experiencing Arrest Counterblastings PART THREE: APPLIED McLUHAN 13. Literature and Media: A Round Trip Engaging with or Applying McLuhan? 'Visual Literate' Forms Masking the Guru Actual Sci-Fi Rear-View Mirrors Performing Presence Pathological Narcissuses Charismatic Flesh Epilogue: Witty Fool or Foolish Wit? Merging Right and Left Coda: Enters the Fool, Exit All Others Notes Bibliography Index

Literary Prayer and Personal Possession in a Newly Discovered Tudor Book of Hours

My discovery of a fifteenth-century book of hours, annotated by members of a sixteenth-century Norfolk aristocratic family, offers evidence of literate devotions at the cusp of the English Reformation. By analyzing the prayers and signatures in the volume, I contribute to a larger scholarly project of using books of hours to recover religious and literary practices in the early modern English vernacular. By locating this analysis in the family history of the volume, I hope to contribute as well to the study of both male and female devotional discourse, the study of book ownership in the early modern period, and the appreciation of early English men and women as imaginative writers with literary, as well as liturgical, aspirations.

The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 by Lawrence P. Jackson (review)

Reviewed by: The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 by Lawrence P. Jackson Michael Lackey Lawrence P. Jackson . The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. 579 pp. $35.00. Dauntingly ambitious and brilliantly executed, Lawrence Jackson's The Indignant Generation deftly charts the ideological twists and narrative turns of African American literature and criticism from the hopeful days of New Deal economics to the tense days of pre-Black Power racial nationalism. In a surprising but effective move, Jackson uses the tortuous career of the now somewhat obscure scholar-novelist J. Saunders Redding to define the dilemmas facing black writers during this relatively neglected period. Considered one of the deans of African American scholarship from the 1950s through the 1970s, Redding was the author of To Make a Poet Black (1939), a sweeping study of African American literature from the eighteenth century to the 1930s. Yet he also made a name as a serious novelist, whose Stranger and Alone (1950) anticipated Ellison's soon-to-be-published Invisible Man (1952). What interests Jackson most in Redding are the conflicts he encountered as he navigated his way through his age's political, aesthetic and social minefields. As both a critic and imaginative writer, Redding found himself caught between racially charged protest literature and politically disengaged modernist aesthetics, between racist American democracy and race-uplift communist movements, and between black assimilationists and black nationalists. The Indignant Generation pivots on these dilemmas, which, according to Jackson, injured Redding's writing life and significantly damaged his later reputation. What is more important, however, is that Jackson uses these dilemmas to illuminate the lives and works of numerous writers from the mid-twentieth century. Jackson's ability to provide a multilayered context in which great works emerged is inestimably valuable. For instance, in the lead-up to his discussion of the momentous publication of Wright's Native Son in 1940, Jackson skillfully examines the influence of Sterling Brown's searing analysis of stereotypes of blacks in U. S. literature, the degree to which "communism was helping blacks to become twentieth-century Americans" (57), the repudiation of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s, the positive [End Page 256] impact of the Julius Rosenwald Fund ("the most important grant-giving body to African American intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s" [97]), and African American intellectuals' knotty but escalating critique of white liberals. Taken alone, each of these examinations is stimulating and insightful. But when one realizes how they work together to set the stage for Jackson's chapter "Bigger Thomas among the Liberals," the cumulative effect is intellectually staggering. This is not to say that Jackson shapes all this material to offer a new interpretation of Wright's novel. Rather, his focus is on the "Native Son effect—really the Bigger Thomas effect," which "stimulated an enormous growth in consciousness in American audiences and publishers" (125). Bigger replaced "the stereotype of Uncle Tom" in the minds of blacks and whites (125). His challenging character forced writers to do more "dense psychological realist exploration" (130), and established Wright as "the point man for black defiance in the 1940s" (138). Put simply, Jackson persuasively demonstrates just why black writers felt compelled to take their aesthetic and political cues from Wright after 1940. Native Son put white liberals, in particular, in an uncomfortable position. After Wright's searching depiction of the Dalton family (the Daltons' financially support the NAACP but get rich from slum tenements), these liberals began to take a more serious approach to the issue of race. For instance, the editor Thomas Sancton produced "a cutting edge kind of literary criticism" imagining "a world uninflected by race bias" (155). In 1943, Bucklin Moon published The Darker Brother, which established his "credentials as the most liberal white American novelist" (153). A year after its appearance, Jackson claims, "white writers no longer delved into extended caricature with the presumption that it might stand in for serious literature" (156). By the mid-forties, however, black writers began to refine techniques for picturing "the unconscious of white America," the dark realm where writers such...

Landscapes of Postmodernity: Donald Barthelme's Architecture

ABSTRACT Exploring Donald Barthelme's literary representations of architecture, this essay traces how the author manipulates architectural history as a means of critiquing modernism and contemporary culture. Despite frequent references to Barthelme's familial relationship to architecture, little has been studied about how this intimacy is encoded in his imaginative writings. Focusing on the short story collections Sixty Stories and Forty Stories, this essay considers the usefulness of architecture as an interart analogy for Barthelme's texts. Seizing on the theories of Fredric Jameson, I argue that Barthelme's works highlight popular displeasure with modernist orthodoxy by using strategies similar to early postmodern architecture.

Feminist Perspectives And Intra-gender Conflict In Tess Onwueme’s Tell It To Women.

INTRODUCTIONFeminism has over the years foregrounded a system of ideas and theories that pay particular attention to women's rights especially as these affect their place in culture and society. As an umbrella ideological concept, it designates the point of view that women's rights and opportunities have been circumscribed by social systems specifically designed to benefit men to the disadvantage of women. It operates on the belief that the negative impact of patriarchal values and practices on the lives of women is a major for most of the injustices suffered by this group of individuals. Hence, Lisa Tuttle sees feminism as ... the advocacy of women's rights based on a belief in the equality of the sexes (Acholonu 7). She further describes a feminist as ...one who is aware of and seeking to end women's subjugation in any way and for any reason (7). Simply put, feminism advocates the empowerment of women through the enthronement of their fundamental human rights. It is the agitation for parity between men and women in economic, political and social spheres of life, in the belief that women have been persistently discriminated against by virtue of their gender. This type of discrimination is assumed to have continued to inhibit their sense of wellbeing and confidence in their personal potentials.Historically, the feminist movement evolved from radical politics in the Western world-Europe and North America-between the 1830s and 1890s. In these continents, it included women's struggle for improved work conditions, remunerations and suffrages. Women won the right to vote in the United States of America in 1920 and in Europe in 1928. In outlining the history of feminism, the era of the various campaigns to obtain the rights to vote has been described as the first wave of modern feminism while the women's liberation movements of the 1970s is its second wave (David Macey 123). But today, feminism as an ideological construct has succeeded in influencing the emergence and growth of feminist literary studies, even in Africa. Feminist criticism devotes much space and time to the discussion of literary texts through the analysis of issues relating to women and gender. African feminist writers like Mariama Ba, Buchi Emecheta, Zaynab Alkali, and Tsitsi Dangarembga focus on examining the ideological basis of denigrating women and suggest ways of redressing the situation. These African female writers' creative credo is essentially womancentred and promotes change-oriented literary works.The notion that the woman's value as a human being is often tied to her roles within domesticity has been the subject of heated and often controversial debates within and outside the world of academics. In fact, the proliferation of women centred texts in recent African literature is often regarded as one means by which women intend to correct the imbalance in gender relationships. For example, many African female literary critics (Rose Acholonu, Helen Marie Umeh, Rose Mezu, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Katherine Frank, and Mary Modupe Kolawole) are quick to pick holes in the type of delineation given to female characters in many maleauthored texts. These critics argue that, even at their best, imaginative writings by men are not accurate representations of the actual positions of women in society. In their view, nobody can best apprehend and faithfully reflect the complexities of the condition of women better than the women themselves.TESS ONWUEME AND HER ARTTess Onwueme is one of Africa's most prolific female playwrights. She obtained her Ph. D. from the University of Benin, Benin-City, and her first and second degrees from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, both in Nigeria. She is the Distinguished Professor of Cultural Diversity and English at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, USA. Recently, Onwueme was appointed the University Professor of Global Letters, a very prestigious honour which officially makes her the solicitor and advocate for the oppressed (The Guardian, February 27, 2011). …

The Family in the Medieval Islamic World

Family is underresearched in the study of the medieval Islamic world. Among historians, it is an uncontroversial topic, except for ideologically driven arguments about the cultural influence of Christian women in Muslim households in Islamic Spain. The Muslim conquests must, however, have brought numerous different models of family and kinship into contact or conflict throughout the conquered territories; nevertheless, conceptualizations of family have remained undiversified, intuitive and naturalistic. A sociological approach to the role of families in creating urban elites of religious scholars has supported an influential theory of the latters’ importance in Muslim public life, while the Jewish households documented in the Cairo Geniza have provided images of urban domesticity. There has been limited discussion of rural families, of types of families and kinship groups and of tribalism. Some family-related topics, such as marriage, children, slavery, gender, sexuality, or women in Islam, have been studied under separate labels, but not within a broader approach that connects family members’ domestic roles with the family’s public functions and with wider historical questions. In the medieval sources, family held an important place in symbolic thought and in the literary imagination, as well as in religious and historical writing, political theory, and dynastic propaganda. While most historians continue to discuss medieval families in Islamic lands as collectivities and social vehicles, the investigation of subjective attitudes to family and other group relationships, against the backdrop of the notions of selfhood and agency found in biographical and imaginative writings, is an emerging trend among literary scholars.

Göran Blix . From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009. Pp. 310. $59.95.

Because such great crowds had gone to town on July 14, 1790, for the Festival of the Federation, the French countryside was so deserted that it could have been mistaken for Pompeii or Herculaneum. This analogy, taken from Jules Michelet, is just one of the many striking details that are included in Göran Blix's book. As the title indicates, Blix's concern is with showing the many, often extremely subtle ways in which Pompeii figured in the imagination of writers and artists in the nineteenth century. With a fine eye for analogies and a deep knowledge of nineteenth-century French literature, he brings to light a remarkable number of references to Pompeii woven into the texts of such writers as Théophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Madame de Staël, and (surprisingly, in a book on French romanticism) Thomas Carlyle. Blix succeeds well in showing how the figure of Pompeii haunted a generation grappling with the idea of destruction and mutability. Honoré de Balzac for one hoped that his novels would in the future help reconstruct Paris in the historical imagination, like the “manuscripts in the houses of Herculaneum and Pompeii” (p. 198).

Les Passions du récit à l’opéra. Rhétorique de la transposition dans Carmen, Mireille, Manon (review)

Reviewed by: Les Passions du récit à l’opéra. Rhétorique de la transposition dans Carmen, Mireille, Manon Nelly Furman Rodriguez, Christine. Les Passions du récit à l’opéra. Rhétorique de la transposition dans Carmen, Mireille, Manon. Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier (Études romantiques et dix-neuviémistes, 3), 2009. Pp. 664. ISBN 978-2-8124-0052-0 At nearly seven hundred pages this book extends a challenge to its readers, but it is a challenge that could turn into a rewarding experience. Through the lens of genetic criticism, the author studies the adaptation of three nineteen-century literary narratives into operas: Jules Massenet’s Manon Lescaut (1884) inspired by l’Abbé Prévost’s novel of l’Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731), Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) adapted from Prosper Mérimée’s short story (1835), and Charles Gounod’s Mireille (1864) based on the narrative poem Mireio by Frédéric Mistral (1859). The importance of the musical score in relation to the linguistic text has been debated by musicologists and composers for centuries. To wit: in 1786, Antonio Salieri composed a one-act opera on a libretto written by Giovanni Battista Casti entitled Prima la musica e poi le parole, decidedly putting words in second position and two centuries later, in 1942, Richard Strauss in Capriccio reviews the arguments of this long lasting debate, but leaving it unresolved in his opera. For Christine Rodriguez, in the nineteenth century, the French lyrical stage and more particularly l’Opéra comique —both Manon Lescaut and Carmen were first produced there—stand in opposition to the Italian and German domination of the international musical world. According to Rodriguez, music did not escape the impetus of nationalism in the nineteenth century and “l’exception française” rated le parole first over la musica, thus giving libretti status among literary genres. In Rodriguez’s genetic approach, the narrative serves as the original text, while the libretto is taken as a rendition. Musicologists have often noted major changes in the adaptation of stories from literature to the lyrical stage. But Rodriguez’s critical approach uses formal elements found in the theories of Barthes, Genette, Greimas, Propp, and Ubersfeld to focus on the function of characters, structural repetitions, semiotic variations, rhetorical strategies, and recurrent themes. The extensive network of components studied by Rodriguez—the suffering subject, time and space, literary and operatic stereotypes, the quest for love, the vraisemblable, narrative strategies, dramatic constrictions, and the stages of passion and the staging of their scenes—occasionally [End Page 154] brings forth unnoticed aspects of the novel or the opera. Genetic criticism takes as its object of study not the text per se, but the creative process. By contrasting libretti with their sources of inspiration, Rodriguez found fertile ground to observe the strategies employed, on the one hand, by the creative imagination of writers and, on the other, by those attempting to respect themes and episodes of a plot while writing within the confines and requirements dictated by different artistic purposes. Nelly Furman Cornell University Copyright © 2010 University of Nebraska Press

Eurocentrism and Artistic Creation in Chinua Achebe’s <i>Things Fall Apart</i>

This article goes beyond the plot of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to codify the inspiration and moving spirit behind the novel. Eurocentrism is a philosophical and cultural construct that perceives Europe as the centre of civilization and the future of humanity. The racism that Eurocentrism engendered accorded an inferiority status to non-whites. In the quest to correct and rehabilitate the African cultural past from a sympathetic insider’s perspective, Achebe adopted cultural nationalism as an ideological frame of reference in order to affirm his people’s ethos in Things Fall Apart. As an objective and balanced imaginative writer, however, Achebe demonstrated moral integrity in portraying his people’s past with all its strengths and imperfections. In specific terms, the novel depicts such cardinal themes as Igbo festivals, ceremonial rites and worship of the gods, the people’s oral culture and other social practices, the colonial and missionary era that was both disruptive and also conferred some benefits, and Okonkwo’s tragedy that hinged mainly on his unbalanced understanding of the duality concept in Igbo cosmology.