Pub Date : 2017-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2017.1402478
John A. Gronbeck‐Tedesco
ABSTRACT This article investigates the concept of culture as it has functioned in the discourse of crisis across the social sciences and humanities. As part and parcel of contemporary globality’s restructuring, culture as an ontological and ideational entity continues to structure the syntax of worldly antagonism even as its precise definition is ever expansive and elusive and without geographical centre. By canvassing the varying work of theorists from Matthew Arnold and W.E.B. Du Bois to Raymond Williams and Homi Bhabha, this discussion attempts to bridge several appropriations of culture in order to submit a rereading of culture’s textuality at the intersection of interdisciplinarity and the lineaments of conflict. It then traces this genealogy up to today’s deployment of culture, which rests on a discourse of tolerance that, as Wendy Brown has shown, allows for power and violence to materialise within a framework of liberal democratic pluralism.
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Pub Date : 2017-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2017.1402470
A. Abba
ABSTRACT Many critics of Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi have contended that the play portrays an atmosphere of terror and irrationality, which reflects Irobi’s fascination with an ‘invitation to orgy’ (Eagleton) as the panacea to the oppressive political leadership in his postcolonial Nigeria. Beyond this observation, however, the position that in his obsession with power, Nwokedi, the protagonist snowballs into an object of terror himself has not been fully examined. Seeking to further this point of reflection, this paper engages the Hegelian theory of freedom in relation to the Dionysian myth of irrationality as a paradigm for examining the ironical attitude of power in Nwokedi. It interrogates the lure of power and the attempt to reinvent primordial human blood ritual in the play. Nwokedi’s positive riot of perversity, set against a politician’s economics of exploitation results in the death-drive that commands its beholder to relish human annihilation at that point where the opposition between law and personal desire is ‘most dramatically dismantled’ (Eagleton). The paper concludes that if the enchanted ritual revolutionist becomes at once deity and rebel, judge and outlaw, autocrat and anarchist, he equally plunges headlong into that solitude which is both self-willed and tragic.
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Pub Date : 2017-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2017.1402477
S. Ghosh, Rajni Singh
ABSTRACT Women, from time immemorial, are always considered subservient to men, and they have remained at the disposal of the head of the family, the father. They are denied their basic human rights and the ‘biological control over their bodies’ as woman is the sexual property of her family and at the same time her body is negotiated for sustaining family honour. The female body is subjected to regulation and control in order to achieve the intended docility, a process through which power is dissociated from the body. The guardianship of women’s bodies make men proud possessor of property rights as well as self-acclaimed protector from their enemies. The body of the woman is the site for contesting where men can take revenge upon other men by violating her sexuality, thus, taking revenge on her ‘owner.’ Usha Ganguly’s play, Hum Mukhtara, an adaptation of Mukhtar Mai’s sensational and inspirational autobiography, In the Name of Honor: A Memoir, registers the protest of a victim of an institution sanctioned gang rape who later became one of the foremost figures of women empowerment in one of the most hostile countries for women in the world, Pakistan. Although the play brings out the inhuman brutality of the patriarchal society, it is a play of hope and inspiration as the protagonist emerges victorious by transcending the notions of ‘izzat’ (honour) and stigma to fight back against her tormentors, turning her docile body into a site of resistance. The present paper seeks to interrogate Usha Ganguly’s use of the theatrical space in the play to protest against the materialisation and objectification of female body by advocating forcefully for the empowerment of women and emancipation from their bodily constrictions.
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Pub Date : 2017-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2017.1348068
D. Coleman, S. Nair
ABSTRACT In 1893 Alfred Deakin coined the term ‘Austral-Asia’ and argued, in Irrigated India and Temple and Tomb in India, that India and its citizens were central to Australia’s future. By 1901, he was furiously defending the White Australia policy, warning Australian citizens of the threat of non-Europeans to the future of the new nation. This dramatic shift – from perceiving India as an opportunity to perceiving it as a threat – is attributable to the influence of Charles Pearson's National Life and Character (1894) which warned of the end of white hegemony if white men began mixing with the Chinese, ‘Hindoo’ and ‘Negro’ races. Pearson’s work questioned the assumption that white men were born to rule, advocating the preservation of ‘white men’s countries’ to maintain white supremacy for as long as possible. The emergence of a transnational community of white men, in response to Pearson’s call to action, provided Deakin with the language and connections to resituate Australia in the world on terms that were racial rather than regional.
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Pub Date : 2017-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2017.1348070
A. Bharat
In Le Temps retrouvé, Proust writes regretfully of how his work has been misunderstood. Even those who were favourable to the Proustian project, he complains, ended up congratulating him for achieving the opposite of what he actually intended. They praised him for discovering certain truths through amicroscope whereas, Proust claims, he had used a telescope. Far from being a ‘fouilleur de détails’, he describes himself as seeking ‘les grandes lois’. Proust remains among themostmisunderstood authors of the last century. Beginning to read Proust, to borrow an analogy from Schopenhauer, is to look at the front-side of a piece of embroidery – it is quite beautiful, but, for the beholder, the dots have not yet quite been connected. Finishing Proust is to consult the back of the embroidery and to see how all the stiches have been worked together to form the images on the other side. But even when one sees the back of the piece of embroidery, numerous questions remain. Yes, Proust’s work undoubtedly lends itself easily to misunderstandings. Changing gears slightly, misunderstanding is a major theme of the work (and life) of E. M. Forster, especially in A Passage to India. He writes that ‘[a] pause in the wrong place, an intonation misunderstood, and a whole conversation went awry’. What about a written conversation, a text? Forster’s comments evidently hold true there as well, but there is one aspect to be added. In a text, misunderstanding can arise, quite unconsciously, from omissions – not on the part of the writer, but the reader. Without lapsing into cliché, what is not said is often more interesting than what is actually said. But also, what is not heard, or mistakenly heard (an inversion of the infamous Freudian slip), is often more interesting that what is actually heard, or accurately heard. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Forster, a maestro of misunderstanding, would find one of his sentences misunderstood by the eminent critic Lionel Trilling – and that, to curious effect. Towards the end of his book titled E.M. Forster, Trilling cites a passage from an essay by Forster that recounts his time in Cairo during the war. Trilling introduces this passage by saying that it displayshow ‘literatureworks to “help”us’.He cites Forster as havingwritten that:
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Pub Date : 2017-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2017.1348067
Parisa Shams
ABSTRACT Critics have employed a wide range of post-structuralist theories to cast light on Howard Barker’s art of theatre, but the application of Judith Butler’s theories to Barker’s dramatic works has so far been neglected. In an attempt to fill the existing gap in the scholarship and criticism on Barker’s drama, this study will employ Judith Butler’s conceptions of fluid identity and subversive performativity as a theoretical framework to examine the presentation of transgressive subjectivity and the possibility of subversive agency in The Castle, where Barker’s innovative explorations of identity, sexuality, and freedom get manifestation through the characters’ transgressive identities and their re-significations of hegemonic institutions.
{"title":"Transgression Unbound: Subjectivity and Subversion in Howard Barker’s The Castle","authors":"Parisa Shams","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2017.1348067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2017.1348067","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Critics have employed a wide range of post-structuralist theories to cast light on Howard Barker’s art of theatre, but the application of Judith Butler’s theories to Barker’s dramatic works has so far been neglected. In an attempt to fill the existing gap in the scholarship and criticism on Barker’s drama, this study will employ Judith Butler’s conceptions of fluid identity and subversive performativity as a theoretical framework to examine the presentation of transgressive subjectivity and the possibility of subversive agency in The Castle, where Barker’s innovative explorations of identity, sexuality, and freedom get manifestation through the characters’ transgressive identities and their re-significations of hegemonic institutions.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"64 1","pages":"124 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2017.1348067","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42629996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2017.1348055
E. Green
ABSTRACT Romantic impulses govern the fraught, family histories in these poems on conflicts that disrupt or threaten loss to lovers. In Isabella Keats explores a young woman’s resistance to her brothers’ machinations. In The Eve of St. Agnes Madeline confronts an uncertain future, either in her family’s bastion or in Porphyro’s domains. The attention to romantic energy in both poems discloses Keats’s entrance into the manners, attitudes, striking poses that dominate the participants in mercantile and feudal realms. To what these participants say and do, he contributes elements of dirge, musical instruments, furnishings, stark landscapes, and historic accounts of cruelties and exploitation. Mythical allusion, unexpected humour, dream dialogue contribute to the embrace of the inexplicable. The texture of the poems argues that Keats’s engagement with family history is a recognition that the milieus he creates have an afterlife, that the recovery of an imagined past is not limiting but has currency for his own time future generations. His engagement with family history also draws him to his own circumstances, for, he turns to his own romantic desires, writing to George and Georgianna Keats that he believes that he will be among the English poets.
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Pub Date : 2017-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2017.1348062
A. Cousins, Dani Napton
ABSTRACT For all their differences, Scott’s The Fortunes of Nigel and The Heart of Mid-Lothian have distinct similarities. Each has a morally upright protagonist and is set some years after a Scottish-English union has been effected. More important is that each depicts a journey from Scotland to England in search of justice at the monarch’s hand and, inseparably from that, the establishing of a secure domestic space – the creation of a home – that emblematises the concept of successfully co-existent English and Scottish cultural identities. Both novels are thus specifically concerned with the achievement of justice in Scotland by the then-British monarch located in England. The Fortunes of Nigel, set in the reign of James I, considers the factors – personal, political, theological and social – arguably contributing to the overthrow of Charles I’s sovereignty and the establishment of the Interregnum. The Heart of Mid-Lothian considers questions of rebellion and societal injustice within the framework of the Hanoverian dynastic rule over Britain, after the English Revolution and the Glorious Revolution. In that context of political upheaval, what is of particular interest is therefore the exploration of what could be called the continuum between home and nation in the two novels: the experiences of an insecure domestic space and of an unstable national identity by members of two different social classes, in two different historical periods, under two different yet sequent monarchies.
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Pub Date : 2017-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2016.1221622
Dan Disney
ABSTRACT In Alice Munro’s short story, ‘Dimension,’ the protagonist Doree shifts through the nightmare aftermath of her children’s murder. Her husband Lloyd, the murderer, has been incarcerated in a facility for the criminally insane, and his madness can be read as ‘clearly distinguishable from those understood as neurotic or psychotic’.1 Lloyd demonstrably endures some kind of ‘narcissistic crisis’ (Kristeva, 14) and, his drives and impulses disordered, his actions are regulated instead by ‘repugnance, disgust, abjection’ (Kristeva, 11). Munro begins her story with Doree making a third trip to visit her antagonist; the first two he has ‘refused to see her’,2 and at work within these narrative structures are spatial, psychic, and potentially cathartic drives. Doree explores a boundary containing a monstrous presence, circling as if locked in the afterwardsness of repetition compulsion. She is at once searching for a means to anesthetise her trauma while seeking for ways to shatter those imago her much older husband has so expertly (and toxically) constructed.
{"title":"‘Know Thyself’? Borderlinearity in Alice Munro’s ‘Dimension’","authors":"Dan Disney","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2016.1221622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2016.1221622","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Alice Munro’s short story, ‘Dimension,’ the protagonist Doree shifts through the nightmare aftermath of her children’s murder. Her husband Lloyd, the murderer, has been incarcerated in a facility for the criminally insane, and his madness can be read as ‘clearly distinguishable from those understood as neurotic or psychotic’.1 Lloyd demonstrably endures some kind of ‘narcissistic crisis’ (Kristeva, 14) and, his drives and impulses disordered, his actions are regulated instead by ‘repugnance, disgust, abjection’ (Kristeva, 11). Munro begins her story with Doree making a third trip to visit her antagonist; the first two he has ‘refused to see her’,2 and at work within these narrative structures are spatial, psychic, and potentially cathartic drives. Doree explores a boundary containing a monstrous presence, circling as if locked in the afterwardsness of repetition compulsion. She is at once searching for a means to anesthetise her trauma while seeking for ways to shatter those imago her much older husband has so expertly (and toxically) constructed.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"64 1","pages":"33 - 41"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2016.1221622","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43698138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2016.1221621
James Dahlstrom
ABSTRACT George Johnston’s novel, My Brother Jack, is set in an Australian suburb in Melbourne, the action beginning at the conclusion of the First World War. It is a time period in which American popular culture was rapidly spreading in Australia, threatening the local movie, theatre, music, and publishing industries, and America began displacing Great Britain as the provider of culture forms to Australia. This paper examines the narrator’s struggle with his identity as a metaphor for Australia’s struggle to maintain a unique cultural identity in the face of America’s burgeoning influence. It highlights the similarities between Helen Midgeley – the narrator’s wife – and the life he builds with her, and Johnston’s perceptions of American popular culture. It further places the narrator’s brother Jack in a position to represent a more ‘traditional’ Australian culture, with his demise a sad acceptance of the changing nature of an Australia that is overrun by America’s influence.
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