Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2243536
Qianqian Xu, Baojie Li
In the first sentence of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf emphasizes the heroine Clarissa Dalloway said that “she would buy the flowers herself ” (1). Immediately, in the second paragraph consisting of three sentences, a detailed explanation is given that Lucy the maid is engaged otherwise and thereby is not available for the errand. However, closer examination reveals that the third-person narrative seemingly highlighting an objective description of Lucy’s unavailability is subtly questioned by the first-person focalization, and further reinforced by the stream-of-consciousness orientation of the narrative. In this sense, the decision to go to buy banquet flowers is more a willingness on the part of Clarissa Dalloway than a necessity out of Lucy’s unavailability, which is proved by the female protagonist’s hilarity in the follow-up exclamatory sentences: “what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge” (1). In consideration of the party as part of the routine for Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class lady in London, we find it necessary to explore more on her above-mentioned ecstasy of going out of the house, her expectation for the party, and the potential psychological mechanism behind it. Why is it exciting for her to see the hustle and bustle in the street? In fact, the continuity of the story shows this is not the only occasion when the heroine insists on doing such chores as buying flowers. When Lucy offers to help mend her dress, she enthusiastically expresses gratitude by using “thank you” at least six times and then firmly declines. What is the intrinsic motivation behind her persistence? Is her profound thankfulness addressed to Lucy only, or to something or somebody else at the same time? More specifically, is it related to Woolf ’s endeavor of creating novels “devoted to influenza” (On Being Ill 4)? Mrs. Dalloway, whose story took place in 1923, is one of the few exceptions to the 1918 influenza pandemic which killed fifty to a hundred million people globally but was “virtually absent from American and British literature of its era” (Jurecic 1). Exploring Woolf ’s personal experience, we find her life was punctured by several bouts of influenza including the 1918 https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2243536
{"title":"Body and perception reshaped by influenza pandemic in MRS DALLOWAY","authors":"Qianqian Xu, Baojie Li","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2243536","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2243536","url":null,"abstract":"In the first sentence of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf emphasizes the heroine Clarissa Dalloway said that “she would buy the flowers herself ” (1). Immediately, in the second paragraph consisting of three sentences, a detailed explanation is given that Lucy the maid is engaged otherwise and thereby is not available for the errand. However, closer examination reveals that the third-person narrative seemingly highlighting an objective description of Lucy’s unavailability is subtly questioned by the first-person focalization, and further reinforced by the stream-of-consciousness orientation of the narrative. In this sense, the decision to go to buy banquet flowers is more a willingness on the part of Clarissa Dalloway than a necessity out of Lucy’s unavailability, which is proved by the female protagonist’s hilarity in the follow-up exclamatory sentences: “what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge” (1). In consideration of the party as part of the routine for Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class lady in London, we find it necessary to explore more on her above-mentioned ecstasy of going out of the house, her expectation for the party, and the potential psychological mechanism behind it. Why is it exciting for her to see the hustle and bustle in the street? In fact, the continuity of the story shows this is not the only occasion when the heroine insists on doing such chores as buying flowers. When Lucy offers to help mend her dress, she enthusiastically expresses gratitude by using “thank you” at least six times and then firmly declines. What is the intrinsic motivation behind her persistence? Is her profound thankfulness addressed to Lucy only, or to something or somebody else at the same time? More specifically, is it related to Woolf ’s endeavor of creating novels “devoted to influenza” (On Being Ill 4)? Mrs. Dalloway, whose story took place in 1923, is one of the few exceptions to the 1918 influenza pandemic which killed fifty to a hundred million people globally but was “virtually absent from American and British literature of its era” (Jurecic 1). Exploring Woolf ’s personal experience, we find her life was punctured by several bouts of influenza including the 1918 https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2243536","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"46 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46232779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2252970
Amy Gaden
Eighteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel defined transcendental poetry as a “kind of poetry whose essence lies in the relationship between the ideal and real” (qtd in Dahlstrom 2013, 125). Though Schlegel lived before notable writers Thoreau and Frost, he was influenced by the same Kantian ideals that inspired the American transcendental movement. Henry David Thoreau lived an iconoclastic life of honest observations of both raw nature and “civilized” society, developing his philosophy regarding man’s relationship with the world, delicately balancing idealism in the context of his time. Among his publications is his perspective on work, expressed throughout Walden as well as specifically explicated in his lyceum lecture “Life Without Principle”presented in 1854 and published posthumously in 1863. This simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic viewpoint inspired many after him including the poet Robert Frost. In his poetry, Frost balances the “ideal and the real” called for by Schlegel, not simply glorifying what he sees but finding beauty in the ordinary, excitement in the mundane, meaning in the unremarkable. Specifically, Frost explores the deep meaning inherent in simple actions in his sonnet “Mowing”a poem that reflects the influence of Thoreau’s philosophy of work through its focus on solitude in nature, acceptance of reality, and satisfaction in labor. In the first lines of the poem, Frost describes a solitary farmer lost in thought, deeply engaged in his actions and aware of his surroundings like the ideal Thoreauvian poet. Interestingly, both Frost and Thoreau had farming experience; though the two men did not find financial success through farming, both had some of their best years consumed by this laborFrost during his influential years at Derry Farm and Thoreau when he lived at Walden Pond and “hoed beans” in near complete isolation (Thoreau 2012, 91). Likewise, the farmer in “Mowing” mows with “never a sound beside the wood but one” – his “long scythe whispering to the ground” (Frost 1-2). The solitary whisper https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2252970
18世纪德国哲学家弗里德里希·施莱格尔将超验诗歌定义为“一种本质在于理想与现实之间关系的诗歌”（qtd in Dahlstrom 2013125）。尽管施莱格尔生活在著名作家梭罗和弗罗斯特之前，但他受到了启发美国超验运动的康德理想的影响。亨利·大卫·梭罗（Henry David Thoreau）过着一种打破传统的生活，他对原始自然和“文明”社会进行了诚实的观察，发展了他关于人与世界关系的哲学，并在他所处的时代背景下微妙地平衡了理想主义。他的出版物包括他对工作的看法，在整个《瓦尔登湖》中都有表达，并在1854年发表的大学院讲座《没有原则的生活》中有具体阐述，1863年在他死后发表。这种同时具有理想主义和实用主义的观点激励了包括诗人罗伯特·弗罗斯特在内的许多人。在他的诗歌中，弗罗斯特平衡了施莱格尔所呼吁的“理想与现实”，不仅美化了他所看到的，而且在平凡中发现了美，在平凡中找到了兴奋，在平凡里找到了意义。具体而言，弗罗斯特在他的十四行诗《割草》中探索了简单动作所固有的深层含义，这首诗通过关注自然中的孤独、接受现实和劳动中的满足，反映了梭罗工作哲学的影响。在诗的第一行中，弗罗斯特描述了一个孤独的农民，他陷入了沉思，深深地投入到自己的行动中，并像理想的梭罗诗人一样意识到自己的周围环境。有趣的是，弗罗斯特和梭罗都有务农经验；尽管两人并没有通过务农获得经济上的成功，但两人都在这项工作中度过了他们最美好的时光。弗罗斯特在德里农场和梭罗有影响力的几年里，他住在沃尔登池塘，几乎完全与世隔绝地“锄豆”（梭罗2012，91）。同样，《割草》中的农民割草时“在木头旁边从来没有声音，只有一个声音”——他的“长镰刀在地上低语”（弗罗斯特1-2）。孤独的低语https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2252970
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2215919
Kewei Chen
Shirley Jackson’s 1949 collection The Lottery and Other Stories contains a kaleidoscope of tales—including the canonical titular piece—in which the quotidian banality is quixotically subverted to critique the precarity of heteronormativity. By exploring two stories among them—“The Daemon Lover” and “Trial by Combat”—this essay unveils the embryonic lesbian desires and repairs the overlooked queer lacunae lurking within the familiar. “The Daemon Lover” has a simple plot. The unnamed protagonist—a woman in her thirties—wakes up on the day of her wedding, and drinks coffee while expecting the return of her fiancé, James Harris. After a tedious wait, she roams the neighborhood dizzily and frantically trying to hunt down Harris. Her quest ends at an empty apartment, where eerie laughter can be heard from the inside and no one comes to answer the door. According to Judy Oppenheimer, Jackson in her notes written at Syracuse University alludes to “a shadowy figure that had begun to appear to her, either in a dream or in a vision ... a figure that would eventually take form in her mind as the demon lover” (48). This elusive figure vacillates between the tangible and the immaterial, “imbued with the ability to fill up an aching void, never directly seen, rarely even directly alluded to” (48–49). Jackson invents a peripatetic heroine traversing a defamiliarized neighborhood and tenaciously chasing after an insubstantial lover, while letting go of the necessity for any hetero-romantic closure. The story’s atmosphere is psychedelia for it is focalized through the protagonist’s excessively caffeinated mind. It is vaguely hinted that Harris is an illusion fabricated by the woman’s hallucination. When she arrives at Harris’ supposedly “right” address, she realizes that “she had never been here before ... and Jamie’s name was not on any of the mailboxes in the vestibule” (Jackson, “The Daemon Lover” 14). Paradoxically, certain locals claim to have somehow encountered him. Thus, Harris embodies a partial visibility with his intermittent emergences. This https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2215919
{"title":"Queer Desires in “The Daemon Lover” and “Trial by Combat”","authors":"Kewei Chen","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2215919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2215919","url":null,"abstract":"Shirley Jackson’s 1949 collection The Lottery and Other Stories contains a kaleidoscope of tales—including the canonical titular piece—in which the quotidian banality is quixotically subverted to critique the precarity of heteronormativity. By exploring two stories among them—“The Daemon Lover” and “Trial by Combat”—this essay unveils the embryonic lesbian desires and repairs the overlooked queer lacunae lurking within the familiar. “The Daemon Lover” has a simple plot. The unnamed protagonist—a woman in her thirties—wakes up on the day of her wedding, and drinks coffee while expecting the return of her fiancé, James Harris. After a tedious wait, she roams the neighborhood dizzily and frantically trying to hunt down Harris. Her quest ends at an empty apartment, where eerie laughter can be heard from the inside and no one comes to answer the door. According to Judy Oppenheimer, Jackson in her notes written at Syracuse University alludes to “a shadowy figure that had begun to appear to her, either in a dream or in a vision ... a figure that would eventually take form in her mind as the demon lover” (48). This elusive figure vacillates between the tangible and the immaterial, “imbued with the ability to fill up an aching void, never directly seen, rarely even directly alluded to” (48–49). Jackson invents a peripatetic heroine traversing a defamiliarized neighborhood and tenaciously chasing after an insubstantial lover, while letting go of the necessity for any hetero-romantic closure. The story’s atmosphere is psychedelia for it is focalized through the protagonist’s excessively caffeinated mind. It is vaguely hinted that Harris is an illusion fabricated by the woman’s hallucination. When she arrives at Harris’ supposedly “right” address, she realizes that “she had never been here before ... and Jamie’s name was not on any of the mailboxes in the vestibule” (Jackson, “The Daemon Lover” 14). Paradoxically, certain locals claim to have somehow encountered him. Thus, Harris embodies a partial visibility with his intermittent emergences. This https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2215919","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"14 - 18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44363723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2214674
Isaac James Richards
James Tackach, after noting the surprisingly few critical discussions of religious themes in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” argues that there are “two main biblical texts that form the foundation of Baldwin’s story: the Cain and Abel story from the Book of Genesis and the parable of the Prodigal Son from Luke’s gospel” (109). This brief essay offers a third biblical foundation to Baldwin’s story—the story of Joseph in Egypt—which illuminates the salvific and redemptive role that Sonny plays in the life of his brother and the lives of those who listen to his music. Joseph is Israel’s youngest son, and “Israel loved Joseph more than all his children” (Genesis 37:3). This favoritism has an adverse effect on Joseph’s eleven brothers, for “when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him” (Genesis 37:4). Joseph’s dreams and visions about his superiority over the brothers only increases their dislike for him. Out of anger, “they took him, and cast him into a pit” and then sold him as a slave (Genesis 37:24). In slavery, Joseph journeys from the depths of prison to being the second most powerful man in all of Egypt, saving not only Egypt but also his own household, finally uniting with his brothers and family. Sonny has striking similarities to Joseph of Egypt. Like Joseph was favored by his father, “Sonny was the apple of his father’s eye” (114). Sonny also has a callous relationship with his older brother, who admits, “we fought almost every time we met” (126). The brother is explicit about his dislike for Sonny when he says, “I didn’t like the way he carried himself, loose and dreamlike all the time” (126). Baldwin’s chosen adjective here—dreamlike—is a compelling piece of evidence for Sonny’s connection with Joseph, and it is a trope throughout the story. Sonny is described as one of the schoolboys who amidst “the darkness of their lives ... vindictively, dreamed” (104). When he plays the piano “it was as though he were all wrapped up in some cloud some fire, some vision all his own” (125, emphasis added). Like Joseph, Sonny is a dreamer. His dreamlike attitude and vision make him different, “weird and https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2214674
{"title":"A third biblical foundation of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”","authors":"Isaac James Richards","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2214674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2214674","url":null,"abstract":"James Tackach, after noting the surprisingly few critical discussions of religious themes in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” argues that there are “two main biblical texts that form the foundation of Baldwin’s story: the Cain and Abel story from the Book of Genesis and the parable of the Prodigal Son from Luke’s gospel” (109). This brief essay offers a third biblical foundation to Baldwin’s story—the story of Joseph in Egypt—which illuminates the salvific and redemptive role that Sonny plays in the life of his brother and the lives of those who listen to his music. Joseph is Israel’s youngest son, and “Israel loved Joseph more than all his children” (Genesis 37:3). This favoritism has an adverse effect on Joseph’s eleven brothers, for “when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him” (Genesis 37:4). Joseph’s dreams and visions about his superiority over the brothers only increases their dislike for him. Out of anger, “they took him, and cast him into a pit” and then sold him as a slave (Genesis 37:24). In slavery, Joseph journeys from the depths of prison to being the second most powerful man in all of Egypt, saving not only Egypt but also his own household, finally uniting with his brothers and family. Sonny has striking similarities to Joseph of Egypt. Like Joseph was favored by his father, “Sonny was the apple of his father’s eye” (114). Sonny also has a callous relationship with his older brother, who admits, “we fought almost every time we met” (126). The brother is explicit about his dislike for Sonny when he says, “I didn’t like the way he carried himself, loose and dreamlike all the time” (126). Baldwin’s chosen adjective here—dreamlike—is a compelling piece of evidence for Sonny’s connection with Joseph, and it is a trope throughout the story. Sonny is described as one of the schoolboys who amidst “the darkness of their lives ... vindictively, dreamed” (104). When he plays the piano “it was as though he were all wrapped up in some cloud some fire, some vision all his own” (125, emphasis added). Like Joseph, Sonny is a dreamer. His dreamlike attitude and vision make him different, “weird and https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2214674","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"6 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46025430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2227373
Francesca Cauchi
Shelley’s sonnet “England in 1819” reads like a pathology report on a terminally ill patient. The patient in question is England in the year 1819. George III, the country’s erstwhile monarch, is “old, mad, blind” and moribund; the Prince Regent, a gluttonous libertine, attests to the progressive vitiation (“mud from a muddy spring”) of the royal gene pool; the vital organs of state are dysfunctional; the body politic is “fainting” from starvation; and the episode that has brought England’s endemic disease to light is the wryly dubbed Peterloo Massacre – the moment when liberty met its Waterloo. On 16th August, 1819, rural and royal cavalry units charged into St Peter’s Field, Manchester, where the charismatic radical orator Henry Hunt was addressing a vast (16–20,000 people) but peaceful public meeting. The fatal combination of Hunt on the hustings agitating for parliamentary reform and the saber-slashing, hoof-crushing cavalry down below left eighteen dead and almost 700 seriously wounded.1 What the Manchester massacre laid bare was the moral bankruptcy of a government that refused to acknowledge or allay the plight of the impoverished working classes in the industrial north of England. It is this dereliction of duty that Shelley catalogues in his sonnet and crystallizes through the poem’s pivotal blood conceit. The first intimation of blood is given in the second and third lines of the sonnet: “Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow/Through public scorn – mud from a muddy spring.” The word “dregs” is a clear reference to the debauched Prince Regent, epitomizing the dullness – a rich pun denoting a lack of sensibility, efficacy, and sharpness of https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2227373
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2223892
David McCracken
In a 2008 conversation in the Mississippi Review, Jim Shepard self-reports, “My stuff is strange enough that it’s often not mainstream” (202). About a half of a year later, he published “Minotaur” in Playboy. In 2011, Richard Ford anthologized the story in Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar, classifying the text with others composed by T. Coraghessan Boyle, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, ZZ Packer, Joyce Carol Oates, and Tobias Wolff.1 In that same year, the story was also included in Shepard’s You Think That’s Bad. However, reviewers overlook the work’s innovative treatment of cognitive dissonance, generally attributing the nameless narrator’s psychological conflict to marital insecurities related to his defense industry job.2 Actually, the narrator’s dilemma is caused by his misinterpretation of gender performance, specifically his miscalculation of masculine roles within two significant relationships. At the aptly called Windsock, the narrator gauges the authority of masculinity performed during his close friendship with Kenny against that practiced in his marriage with Carly. Over the course of the story, the narrator succumbs to heterosexual masculinity, rejecting the overtones of homosexuality affiliated with ritualistic male bonding. The narrator’s self-assessment of masculine performance is initiated by the unexpected meeting of Kenny and Carly, an occurrence prompting his eventual self-knowledge. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler provides her famous declaration that “gender proves to be performative,” contending gender identity depends upon contextualized actions, “always a doing” (25). She also points out that masculinity is defined by its binary opposition to femininity, and understanding masculinity is “accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire” (23). In other words, masculinity is established through actions responding to institutionalized heterosexuality. In “Minotaur,” the narrator basically scrutinizes his masculine performances in distinctively homosexual and heterosexual intimacies. Arguably, the narrator would reject any inference of homosexual desire for Kenny, yielding to what Butler calls “compulsory heterosexuality” (19). Nevertheless, the narrator’s descriptions of Kenny https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2223892
在《密西西比评论》2008年的一次对话中，吉姆·谢泼德自我报告说，“我的东西很奇怪，经常不是主流”（202）。大约半年后，他在《花花公子》上发表了《牛头怪》。2011年，理查德·福特在《蓝领，白领，无领》中选集了这个故事，并将该文本与T.科拉赫桑·博伊尔、朱诺特·迪亚斯、琼帕·拉希里、ZZ Packer、Joyce Carol Oates和托比亚斯·沃尔夫创作的其他作品进行了分类。1同年，这个故事也被收录在谢泼德的《你认为那很糟糕》中。然而，评论家们忽视了这部作品对认知失调的创新处理，通常将无名叙述者的心理冲突归因于与国防工业工作有关的婚姻不安全感。2事实上，叙述者的困境是由他对性别表现的误解造成的，特别是他对两种重要关系中男性角色的误判。在一个恰如其分的名字“Windsock”中，叙述者衡量了他与肯尼亲密友谊期间表现出的男子气概的权威，以及他与卡莉婚姻中表现出的权威。在故事的过程中，叙述者屈服于异性恋的男子气概，拒绝接受与仪式性男性关系有关的同性恋暗示。叙述者对男性表现的自我评估是由肯尼和卡莉的意外相遇引发的，这一事件促使他最终获得了自我认识。朱迪斯·巴特勒（Judith Butler）在《性别问题》（Gender Trouble）一书中提出了她著名的宣言，即“性别被证明是表演性的”，认为性别认同取决于情境化的行动，“总是一种行为”（25）。她还指出，男性气质是由其与女性气质的二元对立来定义的，理解男性气质是“通过异性恋欲望的实践来实现的”（23）。换句话说，男性气质是通过对制度化异性恋的回应而建立起来的。在《米诺陶》中，叙述者基本上仔细观察了他在同性恋和异性恋亲密关系中的男性表现。可以说，叙述者会拒绝任何关于肯尼同性恋欲望的推论，屈服于巴特勒所说的“强制性异性恋”（19）。尽管如此，叙述者对肯尼的描述https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2223892
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2214673
Z. Taheri
When Gilles Deleuze focused on Kafka’s writings, he had few words to talk about Kafka’s well-known short story, “A Hunger Artist”. Deleuze just referred to ‘fasting’ as a frequent theme repeated throughout Kafka’s works (Kafka, 20). Recently, Zack Horton in an article– “Can you Starve a Body without Organs?– The Hunger Artists of Franz Kafka and Steve McQueen,” presents a different reading of the work. Horton focuses on a Deleuzian concept of “body without organs” and elaborates on the ways Kafka’s artist represents an “anti-producing body in its limit case of public self-induced starvation” to portray a “resistance to capitalist spectators” (117). Later, Horton describes the fasting of Kafka’s artist “as an oscillation between spectacle and art” (119). He uses this description largely to elaborate how Kafka’s artist “never exists as a fully autonomous body” and how “he is only an artist by virtue of his spectators” (119). However, little attention has been paid to the ways in which “fasting as a spectacle” can challenge the established perception of ‘time’ of the “capitalist spectator” and can, thus, alter the way one perceives this world. To this end, this study approaches the fasting of Kafka’s artist more as a “spectacle” so as to discuss how Kafka’s work is similar to performance art and, accordingly, foregrounds Bergson’s conception of time. Furthermore, it discusses how Kafka’s artist like an art performer fails in his task, despite all sacrifices he makes in this consumerist era. Fasting as a spectacle in Kafka’s work has much in common with performance art popularized in the early 70s. Amanda Coogan describes performance art as “the action of the body, the authenticity of an activity” (10). Kafka’s artist has no other art but hollowing out his body. For days, Kafka’s artist like a performance artist sits
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2227372
B. Hamamra
Kafka’s “The Silence of the Sirens”, published posthumously in 1931, is an audacious re-writing of a famous episode in Homer’s Odysseus. The story shows that Ulysses is unknowingly or wittingly seduced by the silence of the Sirens rather than their songs and they are also seduced by Ulysses’visage. In Homer’s story, Odysseus resists the temptation of the Sirens’ deadly song by having himself tied to the mast of his ship, while his oarsmen, ears blocked with beeswax, sail quickly by without succumbing to the seductive, fatal song of the Sirens. Kafka dramatically subverts the Homeric legend of Odysseus by enacting a shift from sound and hearing to silence and sight. In Kafka’s telling of the story, the Sirens fall silent while Ulysses, indifferent to them and their silence, sails by, his ears blocked, his “great eyes” staring in the distance.Thus, Kafka’s version of the myth brings into question Ulysses’cunning that sets himself apart from others.Kafka points out that “To protect himself from the Sirens Ulysses stopped his ears with wax and had himself bound to the mast of his ship” (272). Maurice Blanchot points out that this privilege of Ulysses over his crew is based on his enjoyment and his ability to resist seduction:
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2227374
J. Hirsh
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2023.2223893
Hossein Pirnajmuddin
Abstract This article offers a reading of Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” in terms of its affective affordances. It is argued that the poem rhetorically imagines the possibility of having “a mind of winter” as being incapable of affect, that is, being inhuman. Thus, the central theme of the relation between mind and world is cast as a double encounter between the human and non-human as well as the inhuman and the non-human.
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