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"The Very Seeds of Fire”: Chris Lee’s The Map Maker’s Sorrow
Views:55Chris Lee’s The Map Maker’s Sorrow (1999), produced at the Abbey Theatre only six years after Ireland decriminalized suicide, proved prescient in focusing on this national health problem among the young. The very structure of the play mirrors the fragmentation and messy aftermath that suicide almost inevitably produces. The abrupt beginning, where a character that the audience does not know and cannot know kills himself, leaves the audience in a position similar to that of survivors who find a suicide. Drawing on the work of Ludwig Binswanger, Kay Renfield Jamison, and national studies of suicide the essay argues that young Jason’s suicide represents a direct challenge to life understood as an orderly progression from birth to death and as an attempt to deny the very premise of lived life itself. (DEM)
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Ali Smith’s How to be Both and the Nachleben of Aby Warburg: “Neither here nor there”
Views:105This paper offers a reading of Ali Smith’s 2014 novel, How to Be Both, in the context of Aby Warburg’s iconological interpretation of the frescoes by Francesco del Cossa in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara. Having reconstructed the story behind the creation, attribution, and reading of the frescoes, the paper argues for recognizing them as a major source of inspiration for Smith’s narrative. Furthermore, the principle of “bothness” is recognized as the novel’s foremost concern; both formal—pertaining to paratextual, graphic, and typeset solutions employed by the narrative—and thematic. With the help of Warburg’s concept of Nachleben and his proposition of traveling forms and images, How to Be Both is ultimately identified as a novel vitally indebted to Warburg’s theoretical and interpretative model. Last but not least, it testifies to the “after-life” of Warburg’s ideas. (RK, WSZ)
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Utopian Horizons in Hungary
Views:78Book review:
Czigányik, Zsolt, ed. Utopian Horizons: Ideology, Politics, Literature. Budapest, New York: Central European UP, 2017. viii + 256 pages. ISBN 978-963-386-181-3. Hb. Npr.
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Dramaturgical Roles of Present and Past Teenage Characters in Post-Agreement Northern Irish Drama
Views:95The Good Friday Agreement (1998) has set in motion significant changes in Northern Ireland, generating new conditions which, however, also brought numerous problems to the surface on various levels of society. Sociologists have called attention to how intensely the persistent afterlife of sectarian hostilities affect especially teenagers who are often unable to see their goals clearly. Several contemporary Northern Irish playwrights have relied on young characters to pinpoint timely and pressing social and cultural issues as well as to throw light on the precarity of the post-Troubles environment. This essay discusses three plays from different decades of the post-Agreement period: Gary Mitchell’s Trust (1999), Lucy Caldwell’s Leaves (2007), and Owen McCafferty’s Quietly (2012). Their respective dramaturgies showcase the long-lasting influence of the historical burden of the Northern Irish conflict on young peoples’ subjectivities as well as demonstrate how middle-aged characters are still haunted by memories of the psychic wounds they suffered during the most formative years of their lives. Through their underage protagonists, each playwright suggests that members of this generation might not be able to further strengthen the peace they have formally inherited. (MK)
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“No Country for Old Men”: A Poignant Portrayal of Aging and Ageism in Arthur Miller’s Mr. Peters’ Connections
Views:143Mr. Peters’ Connections (1998) is often viewed as Arthur Miller’s most experimental late play. Yet, despite its uniqueness and evident dramatic value, scholarly
commentary usually focuses on its likeness with Pinter and Beckett plays and sometimes on how it is an apt product of an “octogenarian” mind. Although the
play is also an apropos depiction of the dilemma of aging in ageist America, no scholarly work has analyzed it through the lens of critical gerontology or age studies. Drawing on gerontological studies and research, the essay sheds light on the meaninglessness and disillusionment suffered by elderly adults every day of their lives—the struggles whose apt embodiment we find in Mr. Harry Peters, the central character of Miller’s play. (AS) -
J. M. Coetzee, the Craftsman
Views:39Book review:
Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-Face with Time. New York: Viking, 2015. xxiii + 248 pages. ISBN 978-0-525-42961-6. Pbk. $27.95.
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Critical Wounds, Sutured
Views:101Book review:
Veprinska, Anna. Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 203 pages. ISBN 978-3-030-34319-4. Hb. €74.89.
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Policing the Boundaries: The “Mission Street Station Scene” in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Views:144The essay focuses on the “Mission Street Station” episode in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). The episode revolves around two central problems: the human/android divide and fake realities. The first part of the paper concentrates on theories of classification and analyses the problems of the Voigt-Kampff test understood as a classificatory apparatus. The second part focuses on the Mission Scene as a fake reality and identifies a potentially problematic race-focused reading. Dick, a prolific essayist and public speaker, expressed his preoccupation with questions that constitute the conceptual core of the scene on several occasions. Therefore, the essay also relies on the author’s nonfiction to discover and establish the importance of the oft-neglected Mission Scene in the novel’s critical reception. (DP)
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Celestial Democracies
Views:69Book review:
Tamás, Nyirkos. The Tyranny of the Majority. New York: Routledge, 2018. vi + 154 pages. ISBN 978-1-351-21142-0. E-book. $56.20
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Coming of Age and Urban Landscapes in Edward P. Jones’s “Spanish in the Morning” and “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons”
Views:393This analysis of “Spanish in the Morning” (2009) and “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” (1992) by Edward P. Jones offers a preliminary (re-)interpretation of the urban imaginary in Jones’s oeuvre by focusing on how urban places interact with the protagonists’ coming-of-age process. Detailed descriptions of routes, references to exact locations in the city, spatial relations, and changes of place run through both stories. Relying on trauma theory and Jon Anderson’s conceptualization of places, the essay argues that the geographical landscape is in the forefront in these narratives, but not as a means of emphasizing, matching, or complementing the emotional one, but rather to hide it from view. The protagonists’ memories and identities gain expression in spatial terms, but foregrounding the city is posited as a hindrance to their coming-of-age process insofar as it prevents them from accepting the reality of their loss and from facing and coping with trauma. (ZsLM)
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The Female Gentleman and the Myth of Englishness in the Detective Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham
Views:432Golden Age detective fiction by women offers insights into the competing gender ideologies of the 1930s and early 1940s. The female protagonist these novels delineate is called “the female gentleman” by Melissa Schaub, who describes her as the detective’s equal based on her intellectual abilities and independence. Although the female gentleman seems a revolutionary figure as she is forward-looking in gender politics, her strong belief in class hierarchy, her Victorian morals and relationship with the gentleman detective relocate her in the heritage of the English pastoral. This essay focuses on the female gentleman as a bridge figure whose marriage to the detective not only restores him to his masculinity but also portrays the woman embedded in the pastoral idyll of the English landscape. Her decision to accept traditional femininity reinforces the female gentleman’s role in the recreation of the stability and security of pre-war England. (RZs)
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Nature (as) Language in the Poetry of Seán Lysaght
Views:53The article focuses on a selection of poems by the Irish poet Seán Lysaght to demonstrate that in his work, Lysaght looks to explore nature’s intricate design, its pre-human and pre-linguistic layers of significance through investigations of birds, arguing that rather than offering culturally or politically inflected images of wildlife and landscape, as Irish poets from W. B. Yeats through Patrick Kavanagh all the way to Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley have been wont to do, Lysaght sets the vast natural world, which eludes apprehension in language, against the modern world and its obsession with material productivity and pragmatic efficiency. This aspect of Lysaght’s poetry is discussed against the background of Heaney, Yeats, and William Wordsworth, who are shown to share some insights with Lysaght, but from whose influence he strives to steer away. (WP)
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Beckett’s Politics of Space
Views:101Book review:
Little, James. Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. 235 pages. ISBN 978-1-3501-123-2. Hb. $115.
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The Murdochian Moral Vision and the Art of Contemporary Cinema
Views:71Book review:
Bolton, Lucy. Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019. 228 pages. ISBN 9781474416399. Pbk. £75.00.
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The Truth of Beauty and the Goodness of Chaos: Jim Clarke’s Nietzschean Burgess
Views:37Book review:
Clarke, Jim. The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess: Fire of Words. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xviii + 303 pages. ISBN 978-3-319-66410-1. Hb. £49.29.
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The Finest and the Most Dangerous: Kay Redfield Jamison and Robert Lowell
Views:113Kay Redfield Jamison has spent her career as a clinical psychologist studying and writing about those afflicted with manic depression, especially artists and writers. She has been especially attentive to poets and now has completed Setting the River on Fire, her extensive study of Robert Lowell, in whose life and poetry madness went hand in hand with creativity, invention and artistic genius. The result is a fascinating text at the crossroads of clinical writing, biography and literary criticism, illuminating both Lowell’s poetry and his life-long struggle with mental disorder. The most important question of the book is this: does manic depression help or hinder writing poetry? His illness was no doubt one of the most important subject matters in Lowell’s life work. The parallel demonstrated between Lowell and other “mad” poets extends the subject matter of this book so that it becomes not only Lowell’s illness, but also the relationship between mental disorder and writing poetry in general. Mania, like all mental disorders, is a synecdoche of the human psyche in general; its representation in poetry raises the problem of the mask as well as that of confession. A confessional poem, in Lowell’s view, is a text which contains (“confesses”) the subject’s psyche in its complexity and ambiguity. Mania is both a part of this psyche and a target of confession. As his poetry testifies, paradoxically, Lowell managed to be confessional while wearing the mask of the other. His illness partly explains why his life work is particularly open to readings that view it as an organic whole.
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From Advocacy to Coercion: Public Opinion and Propaganda in the United States from the 1880s to the 1930s
Views:90Book review:
Auerbach, Jonathan. Weapons of Democracy: Propaganda, Progressivism, and American Public Opinion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. xii + 220 pages. ISBN 978-1-4214-1736-3. Hb. $49.95.
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“He / looks into / his own eyes”: Thom Gunn’s Ekphrastic Poems
Views:157Thom Gunn’s oeuvre spanned more than four decades, during which he kept writing ekphrastic poems. The way words and images relate to each other in them, however, changed gradually and considerably. While his early work is characterized by the dominance of the verbal over the visual, his later poems from the 1970s and 80s question the dominance of language and attribute destructive power to the image. Word and image become reconciled in Gunn’s last two collections from the 1990s and 2000s, respectively. The gradual change in Gunn’s ekphrastic work corresponds to the development of his identity as a gay man; this identity, full-blown at the end of his career, is reflected in his mature treatment of images. (IOH)
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Unlearning Gender
Views:133Book review:
Repo, Jemima. The Biopolitics of Gender. Oxford: OUP, 2016. 218 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-025691-3. Hbk. Npr.
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A Novel Inquiry into a Strategic Aspect of Irish Women’s Theatre across a Century
Views:88Book review:
Hill, Shonagh. Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. 257 pages. ISBN 978-1-108-48533-3. Hb. ₤75.
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Hungarian Narrato-Rhetorheme in an American Novel: Harry Houdini in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime
Views:148The escape artist of Doctorow’s Ragtime is in close relationship with each transposed and fictitious character through an aspectual transmission system of character-motivation. The variegated and diverging perceptual and cognitive processes of the numerous characters may reveal a centrifugal system of storyworlds, but the multiform manifestations of being shackled and the desire to escape do meet in the anchoring image of the shackled Harry Houdini and his escape bravura. So Doctorow’s Houdini will be studied here as an aspectual coordinate of the novel.
On the other hand, the mentality emanating from the escape artist’s narrative function of aspectual coordination and the other characters’ positional predicaments and motivational concerns that reflect the same mentality, jointly perform the rhetorical role of suasion. Thus, Ragtime’s Houdini can be subjected to a narrato-rhetorical investigation. I propose that he is a hermeneutically coded cultural narrato-rhetorheme in the novel and the source of further narrato-rhetorhemes of storyworlds that come under his semantic sway. (I introduced the notion of the “cultural narrato-rhetorheme” in a former HJEAS issue [2014/1]). The book’s transposed Houdini is both an overt cultural narrato-rhetorheme (he is present in the narratorial discourse: the narrator actually meets him) and a covert one (embedded in the storyworld). The notions of “repeating,” “factoid,” “contextual,” “assimilative,” and “enthymematic” narrato-rhetorheme will also be introduced as descriptive of Houdini’s manifold narrato-rhetorical roles.
Ragtime’s epistemological tandem (the narrator[s] and Houdini) makes it unequivocal that the modality of the narratorial domain is epistemic. This also sets the escape artist into the novel’s focus; as does the book’s lead (deontic) modality, through the African American ragtime pianist’s defiance of racist cultural prohibition. (ZAN)
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Telling the Untellable: Trauma and Sexuality in Big Little Lies
Views:586The problem of sexual violence, including rape, domestic assault, sexual harassment, and molestation has recently become a topical issue both in public discourse and popular culture. The unspoken individual traumas have found their way to the world of TV series, such as HBO’s mini-series Big Little Lies. The essay explores the unique ways in which the television series treats sexuality and personal traumas. It argues that while by no means can it be regarded as a soap opera, Big Little Lies occasionally uses and rewrites the genre-specific codes of this traditionally low-prestige television genre intended for women to alter the representation of individual traumas in popular culture. The use of flashbacks and involuntary repetition as narrative elements along with the retrospective framework of a criminal investigation make the serial form much suited to examine individual traumas. The television series attempts the almost impossible: to speak of the trauma’s unspeakability, and simultaneously it seeks to maintain its high viewership. (ZsOR)