CEA CRITIC最新文献

Abstract:

The relationship between word and image reached new levels of complexity with the rise of illustration in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scholars in recent years have argued for the visual arts as not merely a means of textual enrichment but also as interpretation and critique, a view particularly prevalent in studies of nineteenth-century paintings of Shakespearean subjects. While many of these contemporary studies center on painting, this theory of the critical role of visual art can be applied to illustration. Taking the oeuvre of Victorian illustrator John Moyr Smith as a case study, this article examines the purpose of illustration in nineteenth-century prose. Moyr Smith’s 1879 illustrations for Tales from Shakespeare are principal here in exploring how illustrations supplement, modify, and even critique a text, the overall effect that illustrators can be seen something akin to co-authors.

Abstract:

Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond (1860) is one of the period’s rare novels on the Irish Famine written by an English writer. In the rapidly changing society of the long nineteenth-century England, the novel form had gradually assumed a social function that interrogated unprecedented progress caused by rapid urbanization, industrialization, and imperialism, albeit from a conventionally middle-class perspective. Regardless, the Irish Famine was underrepresented in the genre, especially given how authors portrayed at length the massacres and uprisings that occurred in the English colonies such as India and the Caribbean Islands. Trollope was not to blame for this problem: in addition to his four other novels set in Ireland, Castle Richmond is directly related to the famine. My aim in this essay is to argue that the spectrality of the famine plot haunts (as it were) the novel’s main plot, which follows Realistic Victorian Novel conventions. Instead of merely nodding to progressivist ideas, the sudden, unexpected, and disruptive scenes of the famine plot deviate from the realist thread, however briefly, and adulterate the narrative with Gothic undertones. Moreover, these brief famine scenes, which can alternatively be defined as “snapshots” of trauma, question English famine policy. The scenes thereby gain a thematic importance to the novel’s otherwise predictable Victorian plot.

Abstract:

Since the late twentieth century, stories of humanoid robots have undermined a clear-cut boundary between humans and nonhumans. Traditionally, the mainstream opinion has been dominated by human-centered discourse, in which robots are invariably nonhumans that are characterized by inferiority, servitude, and lack. This mindset to subordinate robots as servants is outdated, evidenced by Issac Asimov’s novella The Bicentennial Man. In this story, the robot protagonist Andrew is in many aspects similar to humans, and he even commits to becoming a human at the cost of many benefits he enjoys in the form of an immortal machine. Ultimately, what Andrew’s story teaches is not so much related to the changing status of robots as a re-examination of the authentic qualities of humanity. By using the critical lens of posthumanism, this essay focuses on this end and then uses it to consider the expanding world of Artificial Intelligence.

Abstract:

This article examines the theatrical representation of race and its political implications in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon (2014), a modern reworking of Dion Boucicault’s play The Octoroon (1859). It offers a critical analysis of An Octoroon that compels readers to recognize that race, although a product of historical construction, holds significant real-world implications. The discussion of the play begins with its prologue, the importance of which has not been addressed sufficiently by critics. After delving into Jacobs-Jenkins’ diagnosis of colorblind American society through his alter-ego character, BJJ, the essay examines how Boucicault’s original play presents an ambiguous gaze that creates a masking practice often overlapping with colorblind subjects who refuse to address the existing racial inequality and prejudice that Jacobs-Jenkins critiques. Despite The Octoroon’s sympathetic treatment of the mixed-race heroine’s suffering body, Boucicault’s stage version gradually endorses a white hegemony that defines race as an invisible essence while separating the white audience from the racialized spectacle. The final section revisits An Octoroon and argues that the adaptation’s use of the oppositional gaze and the materiality of a photograph as a reflective visual medium challenges the easy separation between the spectacle of race and the perspectives of white viewers.

Abstract:

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is more subtle than the poet's more myth- and folklore-facing poems like "Cuchulainn's Fight with the Sea" and "A Faery Song." Yet, it fits squarely in the realm of the nineteenth-century movement known as the Celtic Revival. At its core, the movement sought to reestablish the rich artistic and folkloric traditions of the Irish that had long been outlawed under British rule. To inspire understanding of what it meant to be Irish, writers and artists of all stripes reintroduced Celtic art and dancing, music and theatre, poetry, athletics, and spiritual practices. Myth cycles and pseudo-historical figures took their places once more in the imagination of the Irish, and as a major contributor to the Celtic Revival, Yeats became the high priest of Irish-ness.

Abstract:

Merwin was a Buddhist, and aspects of Buddhism and transcendental Romanticism mingle in his nature poetry. His poems are fundamentally Romantic but differ in two ways. Coleridge suggests in The Friend that we choose to feel alienated because "we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought" (520). For Merwin that antithesis is instead an unavoidable consequence of writing, and it occasions a sense of alienation that enters the poem and nudges aside the feeling of relatedness he cherishes.

Abstract:

Both labor-based and rubric-based grading systems attempt to mitigate subjectivity in the assessment of writing, and while each method has their advantages, they also come with a slew of weaknesses. Scholars such as Asao B. Inoue, Laura Gibbs, and Denise Krane support labor-based grading because this method reinforces process pedagogy, which, Chris M. Anson comment, helps "students engage in their writing to develop self-efficacy, confidence, and strategies for meeting the challenges of multiple writing situations" (226). On the other end of the spectrum is rubric-based grading, which presents students with a set of clear rules that guide their writing process. Whatever the case, both labor-based and rubric-based grading methods fail to account for classroom ecology.

Abstract:

Marianne Hirsch maintains that literature based solely on "postmemory"—that is, second-hand memories passed down from a generation that experienced a collective trauma to a subsequent one that did not—is qualitatively different because it is connected to its object of study not through recollection but through an imaginative investment. Following this definition, Lebanese writings stemming exclusively from postmemories of the Civil War cannot be expected to emerge before the second half of the twenty-first century. However, this long view of postmemory, I contend, is not tenable in the case of Lebanon.