Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.11.13
Ken Eckert
Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934) remains well-read, and its hero Hercule Poirot continues to enjoy popular currency. Yet the text has not aged well due to some of its now clichéd plot developments and dialogue, as well as Christie’s depiction of class, ethnic and national prejudices in it and her other novels. This study hopes to re-energize discussion on Murder by finding defensible reasons for its apparent flaws. Not only do the stereotypical behaviors of the passengers narratively distract Poirot and the reader from a solution, but their flaws serve as foils against which Poirot’s heroic gravitas and cultural values are positively contrasted. Further, criticism often misses the point that the passengers are performing their behaviors, and if so, the deployment of stereotypes as only acted performances destabilizes them as permanent aspects of national or ethnic identity. Can Murder then be read as an anti-racist text?
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Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.11.03
Grzegorz Czemiel
The article examines the figure of the spy—alongside themes related to espionage—as employed in two books by the Northern Irish writer Ciaran Carson (1948–2019): the volume of poems For All We Know (2008) and the novel Exchange Place (2012). Carson’s oeuvre is permeated with the Troubles and he has been hailed one of key writers to convey the experience of living in a modern surveillance state. His depiction of Belfast thematizes questions of terrorism, the insecurity and anxiety it causes in everyday life, as well as the unceasing games of appearances and the different ways of verifying or revising identities. In Carson’s later work, however, these aspects acquire greater philosophical depth as the author uses the themes of doubles, spies, and makeshift identities to discuss writing itself, the construction of subjectivity, and the dialogic relationship with the other. Taking a cue from Paul Ricoeur’s and Julia Kristeva’s conceptions of “oneself as another,” the article examines how Carson’s spy-figures can be read as metaphors for processes of self-discovery and identity-formation, tied to the notion of “self-othering.” Carson employs the figure of the spy—who juggles identities by “donning” different clothes or languages—to scrutinize how one ventures into the dangerous territory of writing, translation and love, as well as to reconsider notions of originality and self-mastery. Ultimately, Carson conceptualizes literature as specially marked by deceptions and metamorphoses, defining in these terms the human condition.
{"title":"“Brought up to Live Double Lives”: Intelligence and Espionage as Literary and Philosophical Figures in Ciaran Carson’s Exchange Place and For All We Know","authors":"Grzegorz Czemiel","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.03","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines the figure of the spy—alongside themes related to espionage—as employed in two books by the Northern Irish writer Ciaran Carson (1948–2019): the volume of poems For All We Know (2008) and the novel Exchange Place (2012). Carson’s oeuvre is permeated with the Troubles and he has been hailed one of key writers to convey the experience of living in a modern surveillance state. His depiction of Belfast thematizes questions of terrorism, the insecurity and anxiety it causes in everyday life, as well as the unceasing games of appearances and the different ways of verifying or revising identities. In Carson’s later work, however, these aspects acquire greater philosophical depth as the author uses the themes of doubles, spies, and makeshift identities to discuss writing itself, the construction of subjectivity, and the dialogic relationship with the other. Taking a cue from Paul Ricoeur’s and Julia Kristeva’s conceptions of “oneself as another,” the article examines how Carson’s spy-figures can be read as metaphors for processes of self-discovery and identity-formation, tied to the notion of “self-othering.” Carson employs the figure of the spy—who juggles identities by “donning” different clothes or languages—to scrutinize how one ventures into the dangerous territory of writing, translation and love, as well as to reconsider notions of originality and self-mastery. Ultimately, Carson conceptualizes literature as specially marked by deceptions and metamorphoses, defining in these terms the human condition.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79875123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.11.18
Małgorzata Hołda
Addressing trauma as a phenomenon which happens on the level of the human psyche and body, this article explores the impact of the interlocking nature of human lingual and bodily being in discovering a fuller possibility of interpreting and understanding woundedness. The non-transparent and problematic character of trauma calls for a hermeneutic investigation in order to gain a far-reaching insight into what happens with us and in us in traumatic experience(s). The imperative to understand the situation of affliction is an unending task which not only relies upon extant understandings but continually pro-vokes new ones. I argue that the process of healing, encompassing the spoken and bodily narrative, does not establish a secure equilibrium, but rather searches for self-restoring, healing energy and commences ever new understandings of what needs to be comprehended and healed. This article offers an examination of trauma as featured in three short stories by British authors: Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, to exemplify the possibilities of literature to shed light on the intricate nature of traumatic experience. It interrogates the ways in which literature, hermeneutics and psychoanalysis meaningfully converge.
{"title":"Narrative, Insecure Equilibrium and the Imperative to Understand: A Hermeneutics of Woundedness","authors":"Małgorzata Hołda","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.18","url":null,"abstract":"Addressing trauma as a phenomenon which happens on the level of the human psyche and body, this article explores the impact of the interlocking nature of human lingual and bodily being in discovering a fuller possibility of interpreting and understanding woundedness. The non-transparent and problematic character of trauma calls for a hermeneutic investigation in order to gain a far-reaching insight into what happens with us and in us in traumatic experience(s). The imperative to understand the situation of affliction is an unending task which not only relies upon extant understandings but continually pro-vokes new ones. I argue that the process of healing, encompassing the spoken and bodily narrative, does not establish a secure equilibrium, but rather searches for self-restoring, healing energy and commences ever new understandings of what needs to be comprehended and healed. This article offers an examination of trauma as featured in three short stories by British authors: Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, to exemplify the possibilities of literature to shed light on the intricate nature of traumatic experience. It interrogates the ways in which literature, hermeneutics and psychoanalysis meaningfully converge.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"112 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85846466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.11.17
N. Fakhrshafaie, A. Bahremand
Margaret Atwood’s novels are usually celebrated for their blunt feminism. However, in Moral Disorder—a series of interconnected stories that forms a novel—feminist concerns are replaced with worries about territory and survival. The protagonist is an insider whose sole concern is to survive and to protect her territory. The confrontation between the narrator as the insider and the outsiders does not occur directly but could be inferred by her cruelty toward other characters and her violence against the animals under her care. The present study argues that this cruelty, which abounds in the novel, could be viewed as a substitute for violence against the outsiders. The narrator’s gaze at the Indian boy who entered the protagonist’s territory manifests a garrison mentality. The frequent references to axes in the novel are compared to the use of axes in “Wilderness Tips,” a short story by Atwood in which axes also have a metaphoric significance. The beheading and dismemberment of domestic animals could be the punishment awaiting the intruder. The novel establishes a division between the insider/outsider, here/there, self/other and civilized/barbaric to call for action and awareness about the importance of protecting one’s territory.
{"title":"“My Monster Self”: Violence and Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder","authors":"N. Fakhrshafaie, A. Bahremand","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.17","url":null,"abstract":"Margaret Atwood’s novels are usually celebrated for their blunt feminism. However, in Moral Disorder—a series of interconnected stories that forms a novel—feminist concerns are replaced with worries about territory and survival. The protagonist is an insider whose sole concern is to survive and to protect her territory. The confrontation between the narrator as the insider and the outsiders does not occur directly but could be inferred by her cruelty toward other characters and her violence against the animals under her care. The present study argues that this cruelty, which abounds in the novel, could be viewed as a substitute for violence against the outsiders. The narrator’s gaze at the Indian boy who entered the protagonist’s territory manifests a garrison mentality. The frequent references to axes in the novel are compared to the use of axes in “Wilderness Tips,” a short story by Atwood in which axes also have a metaphoric significance. The beheading and dismemberment of domestic animals could be the punishment awaiting the intruder. The novel establishes a division between the insider/outsider, here/there, self/other and civilized/barbaric to call for action and awareness about the importance of protecting one’s territory.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83816070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.11.16
Alicja Piechucka
The article focuses on Kurt Vonnegut’s lesser-known and underappreciated 1987 novel Bluebeard, which is analyzed and interpreted in the light of Marianne Hirsch’s seminal theory of postmemory. Even though it was published prior to Hirsch’s formulation of the concept, Vonnegut’s novel intuitively anticipates it, problematizing the implications of inherited, second-hand memory. To further complicate matters, Rabo Karabekian, the protagonist-narrator of Bluebeard, a World War II veteran, amalgamates his direct, painful memories with those of his parents, survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Both the novel and the theory applied to it centre on the problematics of historical and personal trauma, engendered by two genocides which are often the object of comparative analyses: the Armenian Genocide, also referred to as the Armenian Holocaust, and the Jewish Holocaust. The latter is central to Hirsch’s interdisciplinary work in the field of memory studies, encompassing literature, the visual arts and gender studies. In Bluebeard, Vonnegut holds to account a humanity responsible for the atrocities of twentieth-century history: two world wars and two genocides for which they respectively established the context. The article examines the American writer’s reflection on death and violence, man’s destructive impulse and annihilation. In a world overshadowed by memories of mass extermination, Vonnegut interrogates the possibility of a new beginning, pointing to women as agents of renewal and sociopolitical change. He also identifies the role that art plays in the process of potential reconstruction, the story of Karabekian, a failed artist and highly successful art collector, being a Künstlerroman with a feminist edge.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.11.11
M. Cieślak
Since their first screen appearances in the 1930s, zombies have enjoyed immense cinematic popularity. Defined by Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead as mindless, violent, decaying and infectious, they successfully function as ultimate fiends in horror films. Yet, even those morbid undead started evolving into more appealing, individualized and even sympathetic characters, especially when the comic potential of zombies is explored. To allow a zombie to become a romantic protagonist, however, one that can love and be loved by a human, another evolutionary step had to be taken, one fostered by a literary association. This paper analyzes Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies, a 2013 film adaptation of Isaac Marion’s zombie novel inspired by William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It examines how Shakespeare’s Romeo helps transform the already evolved cinematic zombie into a romantic protagonist, and how Shakespearean love tragedy, with its rich visual cinematic legacy, can successfully locate a zombie narrative in the romantic comedy convention. Presenting the case of Shakespeare intersecting the zombie horror tradition, this paper illustrates the synergic exchanges of literary icons and the cinematic monstrous.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.11.27
Pedro Querido
“Nihilist” is a very convenient epithet to hurl at someone. Everyone understands that it describes someone who holds objectionable, if not dangerous, views or ways of life. And yet it remains a fuzzy notion: workaday definitions of nihilism differ greatly from—and indeed are surprisingly often diametrically opposed to—what prominent European philosophers have understood it to mean. Nolen Gertz’s Nihilism is an engaging study that sets out to analyze various conceptions and misconceptions of nihilism. Any such enterprise has to survey the intellectual history of what today has come to be known as nihilism, and this Gertz delivers in almost exemplary fashion in the second chapter. In his history of nihilism from Socrates to Friedrich Nietzsche via René Descartes, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, the author manages to summarize key tenets of these most influential thinkers while dexterously driving forward his discussion of nihilism, thereby demonstrating that Western philosophy developed alongside, and frequently in reaction to, the epistemological and existential threat of nihilism, which so often lurks ominously around those who dare to explore the shadowy byways of scepticism. It might have been expedient to mention Gorgias of Leontinoi, as well (whose moniker, “Gorgias the Nihilist,” though hotly disputed, nevertheless attests to his relevance to this subject), or to speak more about the idea of solipsism (mentioned only in passing on p. 27), but that might be asking too much of an informative but slim book that makes no claim to exhaustion of the topic at hand. This admirable synthesis of Western thought from the point of view of the conceptual development of nihilism is then followed by an equally accomplished chapter which establishes helpful parallels—and, perhaps more importantly, vital differences—between nihilism and kindred concepts Text Matters, Number 11, 2021 https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.27
{"title":"Thinking about Thinking Nothing: A Review of Nolen Gertz’s Nihilism (MIT P, 2019)","authors":"Pedro Querido","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.11.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.27","url":null,"abstract":"“Nihilist” is a very convenient epithet to hurl at someone. Everyone understands that it describes someone who holds objectionable, if not dangerous, views or ways of life. And yet it remains a fuzzy notion: workaday definitions of nihilism differ greatly from—and indeed are surprisingly often diametrically opposed to—what prominent European philosophers have understood it to mean. Nolen Gertz’s Nihilism is an engaging study that sets out to analyze various conceptions and misconceptions of nihilism. Any such enterprise has to survey the intellectual history of what today has come to be known as nihilism, and this Gertz delivers in almost exemplary fashion in the second chapter. In his history of nihilism from Socrates to Friedrich Nietzsche via René Descartes, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, the author manages to summarize key tenets of these most influential thinkers while dexterously driving forward his discussion of nihilism, thereby demonstrating that Western philosophy developed alongside, and frequently in reaction to, the epistemological and existential threat of nihilism, which so often lurks ominously around those who dare to explore the shadowy byways of scepticism. It might have been expedient to mention Gorgias of Leontinoi, as well (whose moniker, “Gorgias the Nihilist,” though hotly disputed, nevertheless attests to his relevance to this subject), or to speak more about the idea of solipsism (mentioned only in passing on p. 27), but that might be asking too much of an informative but slim book that makes no claim to exhaustion of the topic at hand. This admirable synthesis of Western thought from the point of view of the conceptual development of nihilism is then followed by an equally accomplished chapter which establishes helpful parallels—and, perhaps more importantly, vital differences—between nihilism and kindred concepts Text Matters, Number 11, 2021 https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.27","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90466942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.11.22
R. Tindol
Edgar Allan Poe’s eerie short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is a particularly noteworthy example of the sublime, a psychological state in which one is overwhelmed by the magnitude of that which is perceived by the mind. Valdemar exemplifies the sublime in that his death has somehow been suspended in time because he was under hypnosis as part of a medical experiment at the moment of his passing. However, the story also draws particular attention to the means by which insight into the nature of death is acquired by the hypnotist who narrates the story. For a more comprehensive understanding of the sublime experience, one may turn to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and the postmodernist work of Slavoj Žižek, which lead to the conclusion that the dramatic chain of events in “Valdemar” is an example of the sliding signifier, and, moreover, that the instability of the signifier may explain the sublime effect.
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Pub Date : 2020-11-24DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.10.21
Jerzy Kamionowski
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. An American Lyric is a perplexing work of literature both because of its original presentation of the issue of racism in the US today and the original formal ways through which its message is communicated. It is formally innovative and technically experimental in an unusual “average reader”-friendly manner, situating itself a world apart from postmodern “poetics of interruption and illegibility” (Davidson 602). Paradoxically, being almost a poem with a purpose, it expands existing categories. Its sociological orientation and emphasis on poetic language’s capacity to inform, instruct, emotionally move and morally engage the reader goes together with activating more experimental formal strategies, as it merges a variety of media: there are examples of spectacular instances of racism, represented by the photographs, and in a series of scripts for Situation videos made by the author in collaboration with her husband John Lucas. This article demonstrates how formal engagement with the visual arts may serve the purpose of stigmatizing racism and making poetry matter within the field of current public debate on important cultural, social and political problems discussed in historical contexts of racism-cum-race. The conceptualization of the issues discussed here is based on the notion of “seeing through race” (introduced into the field of study of the visual arts and literature by W. J. T. Mitchell in 2012), which has changed the perception of the relationship between race and racism.
{"title":"“By [some] other means”: Talking (about) Racism and Race through Visual Arts in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. An American Lyric","authors":"Jerzy Kamionowski","doi":"10.18778/2083-2931.10.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.10.21","url":null,"abstract":"Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. An American Lyric is a perplexing work of literature both because of its original presentation of the issue of racism in the US today and the original formal ways through which its message is communicated. It is formally innovative and technically experimental in an unusual “average reader”-friendly manner, situating itself a world apart from postmodern “poetics of interruption and illegibility” (Davidson 602). Paradoxically, being almost a poem with a purpose, it expands existing categories. Its sociological orientation and emphasis on poetic language’s capacity to inform, instruct, emotionally move and morally engage the reader goes together with activating more experimental formal strategies, as it merges a variety of media: there are examples of spectacular instances of racism, represented by the photographs, and in a series of scripts for Situation videos made by the author in collaboration with her husband John Lucas. This article demonstrates how formal engagement with the visual arts may serve the purpose of stigmatizing racism and making poetry matter within the field of current public debate on important cultural, social and political problems discussed in historical contexts of racism-cum-race. The conceptualization of the issues discussed here is based on the notion of “seeing through race” (introduced into the field of study of the visual arts and literature by W. J. T. Mitchell in 2012), which has changed the perception of the relationship between race and racism.","PeriodicalId":41165,"journal":{"name":"Text Matters-A Journal of Literature Theory and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49133573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-24DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.10.17
Christine Nicholls
From the onset of the indefinite deferral of our previously taken-for-granted lives, an abundance of humorous online cartoons, jokes, memes, videos and other satirical material relating to the COVID-19 outbreak—and its consequences—has emerged. Humorous responses to this dire global pandemic proliferate irrespective of location, nationality, ethnicity, age, gender and/or socio-political affiliations. Against a background of enforced lockdowns, quarantine, and sometimes gross political ineptitude, with a mounting daily global death toll, humour referencing this scourge continues to blossom. This may seem counterintuitive or inappropriate at a time of heightened anxiety and fear apropos of an invisible killer-virus, known only in diagrammatic—and, ironically, aesthetically pleasing—visual form. Online humour evoking the COVID-19 crisis is expressed recursively via intertextuality referencing literary, visual, written, oral or other “texts.” Interpictoriality is evident with memes that reconfigure renowned visual artworks. The internet enables copious discourse related to the COVID-19 eruption/disruption. Embedded in this article are examples to support the article’s theoretical basis, with intertextuality its major focus. Discussion follows, with speculation as to why humour, absurdity and wit are able to prosper in an environment of radical uncertainty and why joking about our parlous global predicament acts as a vital coping mechanism.
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