Pub Date : 2021-05-22DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2021.1928593
Yujing Sun, Junwu Tian
Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing chronicles three border-crossing journeys of the 16-year-old protagonist Billy Parham, in each of which there appear some sporadic descriptions of animals, namely, wolves and dogs. As the shewolf in the first part of the novel is so vividly described with copious details that it has naturally attracted monographic studies of critics. In his “Wolves as Metaphors in The Crossing”, an article anthologized in Animals in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy, Wallis R. Sanborn holds that “while McCarthy honors and promotes the mythos of the wolf in The Crossing, he also demonstrates man’s urge to control the natural world in a series of human-driven indignities the she-wolf is forced to undergo” (Sanborn 143). In his “Narrative Disruption As Animal Agency in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing”, Raymond Malewitz argues that the she-wolf has “undecidability” as it is “both held and not held, terrible and beautiful, immobile flower and swift huntress” (Malewitz 558). In comparison to the she-wolf, the nocturnal stray dog, the home dog and the yellow dog, which respectively appear in Billy’s three journeys and obviously function as narrative metaphors than other dog-scene descriptions, have not been fully studied than they deserve. They have only won sporadic comments by critics when interpreting other features of the novel. For instance, when studying the gothic vision of atomic bomb that the novel may insinuate, Robert H. Brinkmeyer associates the yellow dog at the end of the novel to the result of the “atomic bomb’s terrifying power to disfigure and destroy” (Brinkmeyer 179). Similarly, in explicating the “genre and the geographies of violence” of McCarthy’s fiction as well as the other contemporary Western fiction, Susan Kollin mentions that “the miserable animal finds his counterpart in the equally distraught cowboy” (Kollin 582). Kollin’s idea finds its echo in Kevin L Cole (2000), Isabel Soto (2002), Edwin T. Arnold (2001) and other critics. So far, it seems that all these smattering comments only focus on the yellow dog that appears in the end of the novel, ignoring the metaphorical https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1928593
科马克·麦卡锡(Cormac McCarthy)的《穿越》(The Crossing)记录了16岁的主人公比利·帕勒姆(Billy Parham)三次穿越边境的旅程，每一次都有一些零星的动物描述，即狼和狗。由于小说前半部分对狼的描写十分生动，细节丰富，自然引起了评论家们的专题研究。沃利斯·r·桑伯恩(Wallis R. Sanborn)在《科马克·麦卡锡小说中的动物》选集《十字路口中的隐喻狼》(Wolves In The Crossing)中认为，“麦卡锡在《十字路口》中颂扬和宣扬狼的神话的同时，也展示了人类控制自然世界的冲动，让母狼被迫经历了一系列由人类驱动的侮辱”(Sanborn 143)。雷蒙德·马勒维茨在他的《科马克·麦卡锡的《十字路口》中作为动物代理的叙事中断》中认为，母狼具有“不可预测性”，因为它“既被抓住又不被抓住，既可怕又美丽，既不动的花朵又敏捷的猎手”(马勒维茨558)。与母狼相比，夜间流浪狗、家狗和黄狗分别出现在比利的三次旅行中，与其他狗的场景描写相比，它们的叙事隐喻作用明显，但研究得不够充分。在解释小说的其他特点时，他们只赢得了评论家们零星的评论。例如，罗伯特·h·布林克迈耶(Robert H. Brinkmeyer)在研究小说中可能暗示的原子弹的哥特式景象时，将小说结尾的黄狗与“原子弹毁损和毁灭的可怕力量”的结果联系起来(Brinkmeyer 179)。同样，在解释麦卡锡小说以及其他当代西方小说的“暴力类型和地域”时，苏珊·柯林提到“悲惨的动物在同样悲痛欲绝的牛仔身上找到了它的对手”(柯林582)。柯林的观点在凯文·L·科尔(2000)、伊莎贝尔·索托(2002)、埃德温·t·阿诺德(2001)和其他评论家那里得到了呼应。到目前为止，似乎所有这些零散的评论都集中在小说结尾出现的黄狗上，而忽略了隐喻https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1928593
{"title":"An Outcast in an Alien Land: The Metaphor of Dogs in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing","authors":"Yujing Sun, Junwu Tian","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1928593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1928593","url":null,"abstract":"Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing chronicles three border-crossing journeys of the 16-year-old protagonist Billy Parham, in each of which there appear some sporadic descriptions of animals, namely, wolves and dogs. As the shewolf in the first part of the novel is so vividly described with copious details that it has naturally attracted monographic studies of critics. In his “Wolves as Metaphors in The Crossing”, an article anthologized in Animals in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy, Wallis R. Sanborn holds that “while McCarthy honors and promotes the mythos of the wolf in The Crossing, he also demonstrates man’s urge to control the natural world in a series of human-driven indignities the she-wolf is forced to undergo” (Sanborn 143). In his “Narrative Disruption As Animal Agency in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing”, Raymond Malewitz argues that the she-wolf has “undecidability” as it is “both held and not held, terrible and beautiful, immobile flower and swift huntress” (Malewitz 558). In comparison to the she-wolf, the nocturnal stray dog, the home dog and the yellow dog, which respectively appear in Billy’s three journeys and obviously function as narrative metaphors than other dog-scene descriptions, have not been fully studied than they deserve. They have only won sporadic comments by critics when interpreting other features of the novel. For instance, when studying the gothic vision of atomic bomb that the novel may insinuate, Robert H. Brinkmeyer associates the yellow dog at the end of the novel to the result of the “atomic bomb’s terrifying power to disfigure and destroy” (Brinkmeyer 179). Similarly, in explicating the “genre and the geographies of violence” of McCarthy’s fiction as well as the other contemporary Western fiction, Susan Kollin mentions that “the miserable animal finds his counterpart in the equally distraught cowboy” (Kollin 582). Kollin’s idea finds its echo in Kevin L Cole (2000), Isabel Soto (2002), Edwin T. Arnold (2001) and other critics. So far, it seems that all these smattering comments only focus on the yellow dog that appears in the end of the novel, ignoring the metaphorical https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1928593","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"91 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00144940.2021.1928593","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45125944","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 : 2021-05-13DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2021.1920356
G. Foust
Noting a second break in the poem’s pattern in the last stanza, he asserts that “it can hardly escape notice that the first and third lines of stanza four [which end with ‘sang’ and ‘work’, respectively] also are not rimed,” a fact that he claims “unquestionably secure[s]” the “brilliant effect” of the speaker’s shift from present tense to past tense at the end of the poem (76). Similarly, while J.H. Prynne does not consider the first stanza to be a break in Wordsworth’s pattern (it “violates no expectation since at the start no pattern has been established”), he does assert that the last stanza’s deviation from the poem’s “normal” rhyme scheme “lodges strongly” in the reader’s mind the odd moment in which the speaker sees—rather than hears—the reaper “singing at her work” (87). Astute as their observations may be, Hardy and Prynne are perhaps too preoccupied with the end of the poem to notice that the first stanza’s lack of an abab rhyme also draws our attention to a crucial moment of burial that’s akin to—but isn’t quite—what John Shoptaw calls “cryptography,” writing in which “verbal material not (wholly) present in the poetic text” is echoed by a “marker” that “add[s], subtract[s], scramble[s], change[s], or scatter[s]” its components (223–225). Unlike, say, the lines “[r]olled round in Earth’s diurnal course/With rocks and stones and trees” from Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal,” in which “rolled” and “trees” act as the marker and the notion
{"title":"A Word on a Word in a Word in William Wordsworth’s THE SOLITARY REAPER","authors":"G. Foust","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1920356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1920356","url":null,"abstract":"Noting a second break in the poem’s pattern in the last stanza, he asserts that “it can hardly escape notice that the first and third lines of stanza four [which end with ‘sang’ and ‘work’, respectively] also are not rimed,” a fact that he claims “unquestionably secure[s]” the “brilliant effect” of the speaker’s shift from present tense to past tense at the end of the poem (76). Similarly, while J.H. Prynne does not consider the first stanza to be a break in Wordsworth’s pattern (it “violates no expectation since at the start no pattern has been established”), he does assert that the last stanza’s deviation from the poem’s “normal” rhyme scheme “lodges strongly” in the reader’s mind the odd moment in which the speaker sees—rather than hears—the reaper “singing at her work” (87). Astute as their observations may be, Hardy and Prynne are perhaps too preoccupied with the end of the poem to notice that the first stanza’s lack of an abab rhyme also draws our attention to a crucial moment of burial that’s akin to—but isn’t quite—what John Shoptaw calls “cryptography,” writing in which “verbal material not (wholly) present in the poetic text” is echoed by a “marker” that “add[s], subtract[s], scramble[s], change[s], or scatter[s]” its components (223–225). Unlike, say, the lines “[r]olled round in Earth’s diurnal course/With rocks and stones and trees” from Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal,” in which “rolled” and “trees” act as the marker and the notion","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"39 - 40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00144940.2021.1920356","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41754331","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 : 2021-05-12DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2021.1928590
Eitan Bar-Yosef
Chapter 3 of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) includes “one of the most chilling scenes in all of horror fiction” (Skal 38). Disobeying Dracula, Jonathan Harker dozes off in a distant room in the Count’s castle. When he awakens, Harker is surrounded by “three young women” (41), whose “brilliant white teeth” shine “against the ruby of their voluptuous lips.” Harker, who feels “a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss” him “with those red lips,” is approached by one of the women (42). But, just as her sharp teeth touch his throat, Dracula storms into the room, shoving the women aside: “Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me!” (43). Frustrated and hungry, the female vampires seek a substitute, as Harker notes in his diary:
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Pub Date : 2021-05-12DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2021.1928591
W. Purcell
Monica Sone’s 1953 fictionalized autobiography, Nisei Daughter, in part dramatizes the intergenerational conflict between the Japanese Issei immigrants and their American Nisei children in prewar Seattle during the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout the text Sone catalogues in often comic and tender ways incidents in which cultural and national perspectives, and at times linguistic differences, became wedges between the Issei and the Nisei. However, in one particular incident she dramatizes in a simple way how the supposedly quintessential American game of baseball served as a bridge between two generations often at odds over their cultural identities and national loyalties. Chapter Four, “The Japanese Touch,” describes three annual events in the life of Seattle’s Japanese American community and the impact these have on generational relations. “Tenchosetsu,” or the Emperor’s birthday, for the Issei is a profoundly “sacred” event (67) and “joyous occasion” (69) marked with scrupulously observed ritual and formality, while for their Nisei children it is little more than a “wasteful [way] to spend a beautiful spring afternoon ... sit[ting] numbly through a ritual which never varied one word or gesture from year to year” (66). The New Year celebration, in turn, is “a mixture of pleasure and agony” for the Nisei (80), who delight in the culinary pleasures and simple family games enjoyed together, but who inevitably feel “tight as a drum and emotionally shaken from being too polite for too long” during the requisite visits to the homes of Japanese friends (86). Sandwiched in between is the undo-kai sports festival, an annual community picnic filled with often uniquely Japanese games aimed at fostering traditional Japanese values in the children or reinforcing such skills as recognizing kanji characters, while also offering the Issei “a rare occasion of complete relaxation” among Japanese friends (77). As the elders enjoy sipping sake and singing sentimental naniya bushi ballads, the younger generation gather in the bandstand, saxophones blaring “loud and brassy” tunes and patriotic American songs (77–78). https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1928591
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Pub Date : 2021-05-10DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2021.1928592
Saera Yoon
Abstract In studies of Crime and Punishment, the role of Svidrigailov as Raskolnikov’s negative double has been widely discussed, but relatively little attention has been paid to the temporal motifs in the connection between the two characters. The lacuna is surprising given the sense of time is acutely palpable in the novel. The aim of this article is to examine Dostoevsky’s utilization of temporal motifs of seven years, which will cast new light on how Raskolnikov’s story is constructed in contrast to Svidrigailov’s. In both Raskolnikov’s and Svidrigailov’s narratives the motif of seven years stands out: they both are sent away from the capital city for seven years, but the ways in which they experience those seven years reveal their crucial differences in their destinies. If Svidrigailov’s seven years in the country is the past permeated with boredom, Raskolnikov’s is future-oriented, rich in the expectations of suffering, future deeds and spiritual resurrection. Another noteworthy difference lies in the role of the women who are expected to save them. Raskolnikov’s seven years in Siberia is better appreciated against the backdrop of Svidrigailov’s eschatological time ending with the death of his wife and subsequently, his own.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-08DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2021.1920353
Sanaz Saei Dibavar, Sara Saei Dibavar
And hence the standoff between a piano teacher and a child starts the narrative of Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile (1958) which is apparently about instigation, quick development, and bitter failing of a transgressive passion between Anne Desbaresdes (the child’s mother and a woman of high status in bourgeois society) and Chauvin, a working class man who used to work for Anne’s husband. Central to the plot as this unconsummated affair is, it is not what commences the tale Duras tells us. Rather, the reader who steps in Duras’s fictional world engages in reading another account, that of Anne’s unnamed son, her “youthful Dionysus” (Welcher 372), in his music class. Anne’s preoccupation with her son dominates the plot, hence pointing to the boy’s role as “a foregound figure, pivotal to the plot” (Welcher 371). The child is the only one with whom Anne has been able “to experience other modes of being-immediate, unlimited, connected” (Hirsch 72). She has thrived “by communicating with him silently and harmoniously, by understanding him without reason and without words” (Hirsch 72). Social exigencies, however, dictate that the child should inevitably move toward individuation, no matter how painful this experience might be for the mother and child. Approaching the novel from a Bourdieusian perspective, we attempt to shed light on the premises on which this separation is founded by discussing how Duras has built her novelistic commentary on the bourgeois society and its methods for development of character and personality. Agreeing that “[t]he music lessons and atmosphere
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Pub Date : 2021-05-07DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2021.1920355
Shouhua Qi
Near the end of a virtual talk on Victorian Literature I gave in the summer of 2020, one of the students asked me a question about whether Tess, the titular heroine of Thomas Hardy’s novel (1891), was raped or seduced by Alec d’Urberville. As I tried to give a thumbnail version of my thoughts on the question, I remembered how the same question had turned a class of one of the graduate seminars I took decades ago into all but a shouting match between equally impassioned students and fueled many a spirited discussion in the seminars I have taught since. The notorious Chase scene now calls for a revisit, in the #MeToo era, to answer the nagging question of rape or seduction, and indeed, of Tess being pure or not so pure, and innocent or complicit in her own destruction (Brady). Before we follow Tess as she scrambles into the saddle behind Alec on that fateful September night and rides with him into the Chase, “a large hunting territory” created by the reign of William the Conqueror (Sargent 3), let us try to reestablish some basic and most pertinent facts gleaned from what the narrator has told us prior to that moment in the short, tragic life of Tess, about which most readers can probably agree despite being divergent in moral predispositions, critical perspectives, and literary sensibilities. Tess Durbeyfield, a 16-year-old daughter of simple and poor parents, with only a few years of education at the village school, is pretty, sensitive, proud (feeling hurt when she is not chosen by Angel as a dance partner and when her father makes himself “foolish” publicly about having “knighted-forefathersin-lead-coffins” at Kingsbere) and responsible, the de facto head of the large Durbeyfield household (“six helpless young creatures”). It is young Tess who takes the beehives to Casterbridge in the wee hours because her father is too drunk and tired to do so. This leads to the accidental killing of Prince, the family horse and principal means of livelihood, which leads to Tess (guilt-ridden for the horse’s death, duty-bound for the struggling family, and pressured by her mother who cherishes a foolish “nuptial vision” for her if she knows
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Pub Date : 2021-04-22DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2021.1920359
Verna Kale, Jessica Raskauskas
Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), published in the little magazine transition and in the collection Men Without Women, is one of Hemingway’s most frequently taught stories, appearing in the most recent Norton anthologies of American Literature and Short Fiction, among other textbooks over the years. The class discussion that ensues of whether or not the protagonist goes through with the abortion and whether the couple remains together is ideal for teaching close reading practices. As Meg Gillette rightly notes, “Ultimately [... ] it’s the reader, and not the characters, who supplies the literary performance the story desires. With her exhortation, ‘Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?,’ Jig concedes the failure of their language to produce an accord” (57). Of course, I don’t ask my students to stop talking, but I acknowledge the ambiguities of the text and the possibility that it supports any number of seemingly contradictory conclusions. Hemingway’s own stance on abortion is likewise contradictory. In a 1933 letter to his youngest sister, Carol, Hemingway scolded her on her sex-positive attitude and the savings she had set aside in case she needed an abortion: “Abortion is murder [... ] If it is of any interest I can tell you about a few abortions [... ] I can tell you that abortion ruins the body and kills the spirit” (Letters Volume 5 319). However, other evidence in his letters suggests that his wife Pauline may have terminated at least one pregnancy, possibly more. Nevertheless, Hemingway was enraged when his sister rejected his fatherly advice because, their father having died, he viewed himself as the family’s patriarch. Students typically interpret the American’s actions as paternalistic and point to details such as his being the one who orders the drinks, his greater freedom of movement around the train station setting, and his continuing to speak after the girl has begged him to stop. I encourage these and other readings that look carefully at the “diabolically ambiguous” story (Justice 50).
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Pub Date : 2021-04-22DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2021.1920352
Jordan Green
Humbert Humbert’s calculated use of the German language in Lolita reveals a unique linguistic performance that differs from his lapses into French and his general American-English structure. While the critical conversation surrounding Lolita has addressed its “exilic” qualities as both an American novel and a tale of emigr e fiction, scholars have yet to thoroughly interrogate Humbert’s use of the German language as a linguistic signal of confession which fractures his carefully constructed foreign façade. Throughout his narration, Humbert takes advantage of his handsome, foreign appearance and multilingualism by allowing his American observers to evaluate him based on their own stereotypical portraits of an aristocratic “old-world” European. Emphasizing this misconceived gentility, the narrator uses aurally discordant Germanic diction when relaying his tale to linguistically invalidate his claims to this sophisticated, paternal persona, only revealing in his writing the predatorial conniver just below the surface. Humbert’s use of German is sporadic; he interjects specific words or phrases which cacophonously signal the falsity of his seemingly noble lineage and conservative, continental paternity. As he weaves English, French, and German into a “salad” of linguistic forms, Humbert reflects his heritage as his father was “a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins” (Nabokov 9). Like several other naïve characters throughout the novel, both Mrs. Haze and Miss Pratt misinterpret Humbert’s foreign appearance, name, and conduct as harmless “oldworld reticence” (Nabokov 68). They permit the predator to live with his prey and pose as her “old-fashioned Continental father” (Nabokov 193). Allowing the constructed social distinction between “old-world” Europe and “new world” America to vouch for his gentility, Humbert’s use of the French language linguistically corroborates his calculated presentation of what Haegert terms the “ emigr e hero” — the European man of culture living in the new
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Pub Date : 2021-04-21DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2021.1920350
Apalak Das
In the above quote, Foucault’s description of a train as a heterotopia is a crucial pointer to the significant dimensions that our experience of mobility can add to our definitions of space and time. Movement is widely discussed today across several fields as almost a primary ontological feature of the modern subject. Yet, the unmistakable relation between literary-aesthetic formulations of space-time and the phenomenology of mobile life has remained relatively underexplored. In view of this gap, this article studies William Wordsworth’s “Two Letters” on the Kendal and Windermere Railway and Thomas de Quincey’s essay “The English Mail Coach” for their anxious reflections on the ways in which mechanized mobility disrupts perceptions of locality and constitutes abstractions such as those of nation, history, demography, economic status, and popular taste. As Michael Freeman notes, such changes can often lend shape to the very concept of culture, as it did with the introduction of the railways (18). I show that Wordsworth and De Quincey expressed anxiety about such changes because they saw them as precursors to signal shifts in perceptions of centrality. In his Grundrisse, Karl Marx described the nineteenth-century revolutionary technologies of transport and communication as agents of “the annihilation of space by time.” However, considering that the idea of space can be extended to include experiential domains such as memory, imagination, and personal identity, Marx’s claim seems to be about the annihilation of distance rather than of space – actual or connotative. Wordsworth’s anxiety about the violation of the spatial integrity and sanctity of the Lake District landscape seems to be related to this destruction of distances, since such destruction would
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