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• Beyond the “Raked Gardens”: Female Identity in American Suburban Poetry

  Jiří Flajšar

  Views:

  178

  The article analyzes an overlooked aspect of American suburban poetry—the writing of American women poets who deal with the problem of how to represent female identity. Drawing on the existing criticism of women’s poetry, a comprehensive survey of the suburban poems by American women poets, from the 1940s to the 2000s, is provided. The article documents the various approaches that these poets adopt in order to explore identity while resisting the gender stereotypization in American suburbia. These approaches include either embracing the suburban ideal of domestic conformity or attempting to present women suburbanites who reject the socially prescribed roles forced upon them and develop new identities of their own. (JF)

• The Seaside Resort as Entrapment and Escape in British Cinema

  Zsolt Győri

  Views:

  213

  British cinema has portrayed seaside resorts throughout its history with much dedication. Films featured both residents and visitors, the providers and the consumers of the seaside experience decade after decade by focusing on the synergies between space and identity. This article explores Brighton Rock (John Boulting, 1948), The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960), The Birthday Party (William Friedkin, 1968), Quadrophenia (Franc Roddam, 1979), Bhaji on the Beach (Gurinder Chadha, 1993), and Last Resort (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2000) as representative examples of how the motifs of escape and entrapment—as manifested in the pursuit of various imaginations, ideals, rites of passage and identity quests—changed through the decades that also saw a gradual decline in the popularity of seaside resorts. The fading reputation and eroding image of resorts is analyzed parallel with the identity crises of characters entrapped in subcultural, diasporic, and migrant environments. (ZsGy)

• The Cultural and Intersectional Politics of Nomadism in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time

  Malou Kürpick

  Views:

  607

  Zadie Smith’s most recent novel, Swing Time (2016) continues her exploration of individual identity in relation to the broader social context by telling the story of an unnamed narrator and her childhood friend, Tracey, members of the second-generation British-Jamaican diaspora in London, whose cultural and racial hybridity positions them against hegemonic discourses in contemporary British society. The text vividly portrays the consequences of their deviance, particularly how the specific intersections of race, gender, and class they embody limit either their cultural or socio-economic agency, and impair their capacity to construct a sustainable identity. Since the desire to transcend bodily determination in performative ways is as crucial a dimension of the characters’ life journey as is the experience of the effects of socio-economic stratification arising out of intersectional difference, this essay explores the complex relationship between intersectional difference and agency in Swing Time through the double theoretical lens of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic performative model of identity and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, arguing that Smith’s novel does not simply bear out Braidotti’s theory but rather interrogates it, especially its insufficient attention to the diverse and disempowering effects resulting from certain intersections of what Braidotti calls “variables” or “axes of differentiation.”  (MK)

• Aging and Death in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and Tennessee Williams’s The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore

  Réka M. Cristian

  Views:

  474

  With focus on the tropes of aging and death in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox (1960) and Tennessee Williams’s The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), the essay investigates the negotiation of the protagonists’ identity through specters of age and the means of encountering death, and it analyzes the representation of the dramas’ senior citizens with special regard to the ways in which these characters challenge mainstream cultural constructions of aging. On their deathbed, both Albee’s and Williams’s protagonists are reconnecting with their pasts in idiosyncratic ways: they build up a conscious “age autobiography” (Margaret Morgenroth Gulette) in an inventory of events and feelings assessing a complete(d) life and achieve an “agewise” (Gulette) identity that comes full circle in the very moment of grace. The characters who escort these two elderly women on their last journey reconceptualize the sense of intimacy between people. The dialogic potential of their empathy, care, and unconditional support during the end-game of the protagonists accommodates difference in various contexts by blurring the boundary between the old and the young as well as the one between men and women, because death has neither age nor gender. Thus, these intergenerational exchanges help elder characters’ agewise enterprises into the unknown gain a cathartic sense of freedom. (RMC)

• Imagined Homeland: Inummariit as the Basis for the Concept of Inuit Nationhood

  Rita Nandori

  Views:

  152

  The Arctic is home to many distant and distinct Inuit communities and dialects. The strength of the Inuit originates in their being tethered to the same ancient narrative harkening back to common ancestral traditions, songs, and stories that characterize the Inummariit, the “real Inuk.” The wisdom of these traditions called quajimajatuqangit, or Inuit knowledge, is the key to creating nationhood among the Inuit via unikkausivut, sharing stories. This paper examines how affirming shared roots, common goals, and speaking with a united voice—the credo of the Circumpolar Council, the prime Inuit organization in the North—has helped establish an Inuit national identity for all Inuit living in several different regions and countries across the Arctic. In Canada, the creation of the semi-sovereign territory of Nunavut and the acknowledgement of the Inuit Nunangat, or homeland, have further aided the Inuit in redefining themselves. (RN)

• Acknowledging Hybridity

  Kata Anna Váró

  Views:

  41

  Book review:

  Oliete-Aldea, Elena. Hybrid Heritage on Screen: The “Raj Revival” in the Thatcher Era. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ix + 227 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-46396-8. $95.00.

• Reframing the New Mestiza: Identity Politics and Social Commitment in Chicana Art

  Patricia A. Lobo

  Views:

  195

  This article offers an interdisciplinary approach to some of the most iconic pieces of Chicana Art using Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Parallels between the textual and visual representations of identity politics and social commitment in Chicana feminist art and Anzaldúa’s work, respectively, will be established through the concepts of “Borderlands” and “New Mestiza” as interpretation keys. The article begins by addressing representations of geographical borders as a unifying theme; then, it establishes a correlation between the concepts “Borderlands” and “New Mestiza,” and the reformulation of female identity represented in Chicana visual art. Finally, it will explore the purpose of the social commitment of the author/artists and how it is represented in their literary/artistic productions. The visual art of the selected Chicana visual artists, including Ester Hernández, Yolanda M. López, Alma López, Santa Barraza, and Judith Baca, accurately portray the experience of Chicana women theorized in Borderlands/La Frontera. (PAL)

• The Petrified Men and the Scarecrow: Substance, Body, and Self-image in Seamus Heaney’s Bog Poems

  József Pap

  Views:

  102

  Seamus Heaney’s poetry was engaged with violence for decades. His artistic exploration of land and fossils revolved around the same questions: to what extent can a human being move himself away from an inherent “tribalism”? To what extent is identity inherited through history and what rights, responsibilities come with it? These questions arose in the author's oeuvre when the horrors of civil war reached their peak in Northern Ireland. The issues of shared community not only played a significant role in the development of self-identification, they also meant the survival of the sectarian conflict. Starting with the first bog-poems, Heaney was keen on producing a mythology to serve identity, and sometimes allowed his political opinion to filter through the images of Stone Age remains from the bog. For scientists, the investigation of archeological finds means relying on methods such as the necessary carbon analysis and careful identification of evidence, as to who these bodies were, when they lived, what characterized their daily routines, and the times they lived in. The same findings, however, had a different impact on Heaney. He used the metaphor of the land of these ancient bodies, and of history, to engage with the question of identity, but criticism made him reconsider what position he should take on the morality of the given past society. At the same time the poet, who voluntarily shared common roots with these long-forgotten forbears, was the one who started deconstructing their moral heritage in the works written towards the end of his poetic oeuvre. In contrast to earlier poems on bog-bodies, “Tollund” from the 1996 collection, The Spirit Level, and “Tollund Man in Springtime” from 2006, reflect a forward-looking attitude in which Heaney left behind an apologist viewpoint for sectarian violence. (JP)

• Critical Wounds, Sutured

  Imre Olivér Horváth

  Views:

  120

  Book review:

  Veprinska, Anna. Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 203 pages. ISBN 978-3-030-34319-4. Hb. €74.89.

• Black Flânerie, Non-White Soundscapes, and the Fantastic in Teju Cole’s Open City

  Dorottya Mózes

  Views:

  324

  This essay develops an alternative notion of Black flânerie, one that foregrounds the flâneur’s auditory experiences and practices in the city, explaining how sound patterns work as indexes of historical traumas such as slavery, colonialism, and indigenous dispossession. More specifically, it investigates how sound and space are connected and what these connections may reveal about acoustical and historical conditions of urban sites. Analyses advance readings of spaces as shadowed by sonic traces, echoes, afterlives, and memories, which point to the sedimentation of sound in geographic as well as psychic structures and ruptures and hence show how different soundscapes suggest different forms of relationality: alienation, rupture, intersection, connection, and transformation. Finally, it demonstrates how sound imagery—including music, dialects, noise, voices, and silence—functions to signal fantastic spaces and places, fantastic or speculative linkages in particular, and produces a version of the non-White fantastic. (DKM)

• Ostend through the Eyes of British Writers (1830-50): A Seaside Resort Abroad as a Home for the British Genteel Poor

  Pieter Francois

  Views:

  198

  This article analyzes how the British writers Frances Trollope (1779–1863) and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) described the Belgian coastal resort Ostend in the 1830s and 1840s. A special focus is placed on both the British travelers passing through Ostend and the British resident communities at Ostend. The article will highlight how the assessments of Frances Trollope and William Makepeace Thackeray of Ostend as a coastal resort frequented by the British can be unpacked fruitfully within two overarching themes: the theme of “genteel poverty” and “respectability” on the one hand, and the theme of “national identity” and “religious identity” on the other. These assessments by Frances Trollope and William Makepeace Thackeray are contextualized against the background of contemporary British guidebooks and travel accounts on Ostend, and against some statistics on the British traveller and resident communities in mid-nineteenth century Belgium. (PF)

• “He / looks into / his own eyes”: Thom Gunn’s Ekphrastic Poems

  Imre Olivér Horváth

  Views:

  195

  Thom 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)

• Cultural Visions and Constitutional Reforms in Canada in the 1980s and 90s

  Gabriella T. Espák

  Views:

  78

  On the occasion of the 150^th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, this essay surveys the various visions of society Canada has lived through until recently. Monocultural, bicultural and multicultural models of political identity alternated to clash over the constitution, thereby making it impossible for Aboriginal peoples and the Québécois to deliver nationalist arguments through the wall of liberal egalitarianism. The failure of the Meech Lake Accord (1987) pushed the country towards a federal and identity crisis inasmuch as it failed to reconcile the interests of national minorities with the interest of the nation as a whole within one legal framework. Continuing clashes over the constitution, especially in the Charlottetown Accord (1992), show that inherent cleavages in the body politic have survived, so multiculturalism has only been a partial solution to a population management problem. (GTE)

• From Achilles’s Tent to a San Francisco Restaurant: Imaginations of the Closet in Thom Gunn’s Poetry

  Imre Olivér Horváth

  Views:

  110

  This essay examines Thom Gunn’s key poems, chronologically mapping Ruth E. Fassinger’s model of gay and lesbian identity development onto it. Gunn’s poetry gradually changed in terms of how he addressed his homosexuality: whereas in his early work his sexual orientation was concealed, later it became increasingly visible, to the point of unambiguously referring to himself as “queer” in a poem from the 1980s. The poems discussed in this article—“The Wound” (1954), “The Secret Sharer” (1954), “The Corridor” (1957), “The Monster” (1961), “Bravery” (1967), “Behind the Mirror” (1976), and “Talbot Road” (1982)—address the split self of the speaker accompanied by spatial division. The poems with this leitmotif form a corpus characterized by a gradual change in terms of the rigidity of the division. Identifying the spatial division as the closet and the split self as the closeted subject, the article argues that Gunn’s coming out of the closet is a recurring poetic device deliberately developed throughout his oeuvre, which demonstrates his growth as an artist. (IOH)

• Netflix and the American Prison Film: Depictions of Incarceration and the New Prison Narrative in Ava DuVernay’s 13th (2016)

  Beatrice Melodia Festa

  Views:

  452

  The essay examines the complexities of America’s penal system through the lens of prison films and the recurrent representations of incarceration on screen. Following an introduction about America’s penal system, Mass Incarceration, and the enforcement of systemic racism through the Prison Industrial Complex, the analysis focuses on the images of confinement in movies. An overview of traditional narratives on prison is offered to highlight the main characteristics of the ambiguous and challenging genre of the prison film, while a closer look at one of its contemporary examples, Ava DuVernay’s 13^th (2016), sheds light on how the presence of Netflix and the innovative narrative strategy employed to portray the complexities of confinement represent a new form of prison film—one that abandons a Hollywoodesque approach in favor of a documentaristic strategy, and, through its distribution on Netflix, reaches its target audience. The analysis conclusively demonstrates how Netflix has changed and challenged the way we see prisons on screen, and how, as DuVernay’s docufilm shows, it has posited the tangled question of race so that the viewer can understand the functioning of the modern prison. By way of conclusion, the essay demonstrates that the new prison film, shifting toward distribution on Netflix as a mode of audience registration, clearly manifests a strategy to instruct American public opinion on race and the criminal justice system. (BMF)

• Emotional Urban Spaces: Atmosphere, Fascination, and Phantasmagoria in Sunetra Gupta’s The Glassblower’s Breath (1993)

  Éva Pataki

  Views:

  78

  Investigating the literary representation of urban spaces and identities the essay untangles the complex psychological and emotional relationship between the heroine and her beloved and hated cities in Sunetra Gupta’s The Glassblower’s Breath (1993). Drawing on Gernot Böhme’s (1993) theory of the atmospheric qualities of space, Steve Pile’s psychogeographical approach to reading cities, Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria, and various interpretations of fascination, it explores the creation of atmospheres in the novel and the role of fascination in the perception of London and Gupta’s female protagonist as phantasmagorias. I argue that—as urban imaginaries—the emotional fabric and atmosphere of the cities portrayed are as much created by their spaces and places, their inhabitants and visitors, as they are manifested and formulated in emotional states of being, whether real or fictional, phantasmagoric or imaginary. (ÉP)

• Miles Franklin’s Growing Voice: Revisiting My Brilliant Career

  Gabriella T. Espák

  Views:

  154

  Rather than any of her more mature writing, Miles Franklin’s debut romance, My Brilliant Career, has been cemented into the canon of Australian literary nationalism. The novel received ambivalent immediate responses upon its publication in 1901 for its unflattering representation of the author’s kin and society. Subsequent criticism soon accepted Franklin’s oeuvre as part of the dominant male discourse of late nineteenth-century Australia, but after the 1970s her writing came under new scrutiny from a feminist aspect. Recently, she has been placed in a long tradition of female writing and discussed for gendered ventures. Nonetheless, however dedicated a feminist Franklin later became, she did not yet search for women’s greater self-realization in her debut but for her own identity and place in the world as an adolescent. This article argues that although Franklin’s classic has become an icon of both nationalist and feminist literature, the dichotomy of these readings can best be appeased through the adolescent ramps of its protagonist. It is an adolescent novel, in which a growing voice argues with her superiors, peers, and self, thereby exploring her authorial, gendered, and national identity. (GTE)

• From Heroic Soldiers to Geometric Forms and Suffering Wrecks: The Transformation of the Male Body in the Art of World War I

  Eszter Edit Balogh

  Views:

  84

  Mechanized and trench warfare, which dominated World War I representations and made millions of soldiers suffer, challenged the rigid gender ideals and hierarchies in the Europe of the time. As the destruction of the traditional manly ideal ran parallel with the destruction of male bodies in the war, the hegemony of traditional representational modes of soldiers was also gradually replaced by more innovative strategies both in poetry and painting. The essay analyzes such works of art with a focus on the crisis of masculinity, manifested quite tangibly in new strategies and representations of visual art. Similarly to soldiers’ written reminiscences, works of visual art depict a sense of emasculation, powerlessness, physical and mental breakdown, testifying that the masculine ideal, which was in large part defined by the chivalric heroic tradition, became anachronistic and unattainable. The figure of the physically or mentally disabled, disempowered soldier as a new phenomenon gained a central position during and after World War I, questioning the validity of the old patriarchal order. Previously marginalized masculinities, for example, the masculinity of homosexual men, and traits previously associated exclusively with femininity such as sensitivity, found their way to open up the borders and shape the Modernist discourse of European masculinity, changing it once and for all. (EEB)

• A Heart’s Pledge in Metaerotopoetics

  Imre Olivér Horváth

  Views:

  75

  Book review:

  Gray, Erik. The Art of Love Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. 210 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-875297-4. Hb. £50.00.

• Geographies of Women

  Zsuzsanna Nagy-Szalóki

  Views:

  73

  Book review:

  Beebe, Kathryne, and Angela Davis, eds. Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn. London: Routledge, 2015. x + 158 pages. ISBN 978-1-138-83049-3. Hb. £110.

• There and Back: An Interview with Tom Hubbard

  Attila Dósa

  Views:

  101

  In this interview, conducted during the fourteenth ESSE Conference at Brno in the Czech Republic, Scottish academic and writer Tom Hubbard speaks about his recent work of poetry and fiction, such as The Flechitorium (2017) and Slavonic Dances (2017). He also discusses the stimulating forces behind and the stumbling blocks on the long road towards Scottish independence. He fears and is anxious about the consequences of Brexit on the multifaceted exchange in the arts and literature that Scots have been keen to maintain with other nations throughout the centuries. At the center of his discussion lies his view of Scotland’s place in a nexus of international exchange that would be, ideally, based on mutual and informed interest in each other’s cultural achievement—in literature, music, and the visual and performing arts. (AD)

• Dissolving Boundaries in the Anthropocene

  Zsolt Tóth

  Views:

  100

  Book review:

  Kérchy, Anna, ed. Interspecies Dialogues in Postmillenial Filmic Fantasies, special issue of AMERICANA E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. 13.2 (2017)

  Kérchy, Anna, ed. Posthumanism in Fantastic Fiction. AMERICANA eBooks, 2018. 237 pages. ISBN 978-615-5423-46-8. EPUB. Open Access.

• Larkin’s Poetics

  Attila Dósa

  Views:

  62

  Book review:

  Rácz, István. Philip Larkin’s Poetics: Theory and Practice of an English Post-War Poet. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi. 2016. 235 pages. ISBN 978-90-04-31106-0. Hb. €76.00.

• Through A Xenophobic Lens: Degeneration Theory in W. Christy Cabanne’s Martyrs of the Alamo

  Susan Savage Lee

  Tamas Z. Csabafi

  Views:

  159

  At the turn of the twentieth century, social theories developed in both the U.S. and Europe suggested that those at the top, or those most well endowed with good genetics, would stay that way, while those with poor genetics had little hope of changing their circumstances.  Degeneration theory, as this concept was called when it took root in the United States from the late 1890s, before it had evolved to formally become eugenics in the 1910s, and beyond. While eugenics offices opened in Berlin in 1905, in England in 1907-08, and in the United States in 1910, there were many forms of it, including degeneration theory. What bound all the theories together was the notion of biology and heredity.

              Westerns like Martyrs of the Alamo became a vehicle to explore these concerns because they inundated everyday Americans with illustrations of national identity. Films like these often mixed fantasy with ideology. This is clearly evident in W. Christy Cabanne’s anti-Mexican sentiment in Martyrs of the Alamo. Examining Cabanne’s film through the lens of degeneracy theory provides a greater understanding of American social concerns in the 1910s. These concerns, characterized by xenophobic depictions of immigrants, particularly Mexicans, culminated in the linking of immigrant bodies and disease with heredity and genetics, namely through theories of degeneration . Cabanne’s Martyrs of the Alamo suggests, through the reproduction of the conflict surrounding the Alamo Mission, that the alternative to “race suicide” is a fantasy of American heroism, collectivism, and cultural exclusion. (SS and TZCS)

• The Creation of Artists and Audiences in Morna Pearson’s The Artist Man and the Mother Woman (2012)

  András Beck

  Views:

  235

  This essay explores Northeast Scotland-born Morna Pearson’s first full-length play, The Artist Man and the Mother Woman (2012), a grotesque portrait of a tortured relationship of a middle-aged artist-teacher and his troubled mother. As Pearson’s dark comedy gradually turns into a violent tale of horror, new semantic dimensions unfold from beneath the initial surface of light entertainment, among them the exploration of the nature of artistic creativity. The sources of this creativity lie in belated sexual awakening and the powers this process unleashes. The essay argues that due to the representation of the liminal artist figure both as a creator and as a creation, Pearson’s Künstlerdrama studies the creation of art and the creation of the artist as intertwined processes which are difficult to distinguish. (AB)