Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2022.2019506
Andrew Black
In April of 2016, the political imagination turned toward what happens in women’s bathrooms. In the wake of what the North Carolina House Bill 2 banally called “the regulation of employment and public accommodations,” Republican politicians incited a highly politicized discussion of bathrooms as private and segregated spaces (“An Act to Provide”). A Politico headline read, “Transgender Bathroom Battle Rocks Republican Race,” as Ted Cruz challenged his opponent Donald Trump for his indifference to the pressing issue of men entering women’s bathrooms without consequence (Gass). Telling Glenn Beck that “we have gone off the deep end,” Cruz worried in the waning days of his candidacy about “the idea that grown men would be allowed alone in a bathroom with little girls—you don’t need to be a behavioral psychologist to realize that bad things can happen, and any prudent person wouldn’t allow that” (qtd. in Byrnes). North Carolina Senate Leader Phil Berger claimed that the “bathroom safety bill has nothing to do with discrimination and everything to do with protecting women’s privacy and keeping men out of girls’ bathrooms” (qtd. in “NC Weighs Impact”). Jerry Boykin, a prominent former member of George W. Bush’s defense team, was fired from his teaching position at Hampden-Sydney for telling a conservative group, “the first man that walks in my daughter’s bathroom, he ain’t going to have to worry about surgery” (qtd. in Beaujon). The specter of the grotesque, predatory “transgender” is pitted against the pure, virginal daughter whose sanctuary he invades. The transphobic anxiety recalls Bruno Bettelheim’s description of the grandmother-devouring wolf (a “cross dresser”) in Little Red Riding Hood: “not just the male seducer, he also represents all the asocial, animalistic tendencies within ourselves” (172). And in response to this seducer, we are told, we need politicians not only to protect us but also to legislate and regulate sexual identity. The rhetorical wildfire was sparked by HB-2, the “Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act,” which swiftly passed in both the North Carolina State House and Senate. Responding to a nondiscrimination ordinance enacted by the Charlotte City Council and inclusive protections that extended to bathrooms,
{"title":"The Secret History of HB-2: Bathroom Safety in the Eighteenth Century and Beyond","authors":"Andrew Black","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2022.2019506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2022.2019506","url":null,"abstract":"In April of 2016, the political imagination turned toward what happens in women’s bathrooms. In the wake of what the North Carolina House Bill 2 banally called “the regulation of employment and public accommodations,” Republican politicians incited a highly politicized discussion of bathrooms as private and segregated spaces (“An Act to Provide”). A Politico headline read, “Transgender Bathroom Battle Rocks Republican Race,” as Ted Cruz challenged his opponent Donald Trump for his indifference to the pressing issue of men entering women’s bathrooms without consequence (Gass). Telling Glenn Beck that “we have gone off the deep end,” Cruz worried in the waning days of his candidacy about “the idea that grown men would be allowed alone in a bathroom with little girls—you don’t need to be a behavioral psychologist to realize that bad things can happen, and any prudent person wouldn’t allow that” (qtd. in Byrnes). North Carolina Senate Leader Phil Berger claimed that the “bathroom safety bill has nothing to do with discrimination and everything to do with protecting women’s privacy and keeping men out of girls’ bathrooms” (qtd. in “NC Weighs Impact”). Jerry Boykin, a prominent former member of George W. Bush’s defense team, was fired from his teaching position at Hampden-Sydney for telling a conservative group, “the first man that walks in my daughter’s bathroom, he ain’t going to have to worry about surgery” (qtd. in Beaujon). The specter of the grotesque, predatory “transgender” is pitted against the pure, virginal daughter whose sanctuary he invades. The transphobic anxiety recalls Bruno Bettelheim’s description of the grandmother-devouring wolf (a “cross dresser”) in Little Red Riding Hood: “not just the male seducer, he also represents all the asocial, animalistic tendencies within ourselves” (172). And in response to this seducer, we are told, we need politicians not only to protect us but also to legislate and regulate sexual identity. The rhetorical wildfire was sparked by HB-2, the “Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act,” which swiftly passed in both the North Carolina State House and Senate. Responding to a nondiscrimination ordinance enacted by the Charlotte City Council and inclusive protections that extended to bathrooms,","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"1 - 21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47295880","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 : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2022.2019509
A. Baishya
means of a deep time help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for epochs and beings that will follow us. The evolution of a species is shaped. . .by its unique history of viral and bacterial pathogens. By rearranging cellular DNA, pathogens can switch genes on and off and thus impact the traits of a species’ future generations. . .We all have genes that for some reason are in the “off” mode; perhaps scientists will someday figure out how to flip these switches, and we’ll each be able to choose other interesting animal traits. . . And how. . .did the mysterious virus that had felled me change life inside the cells of my own body? Would there be a switch I could flip to instantly restore my health? (89)
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2022.2019508
S. O’Donnell
As a central element of Christian theology, demonology has been marginalized from mainstream Christianities since the European Enlightenment, becoming the purview of artists, antiquarians, and fringe religiosities. Yet, while it has faded from much mainstream religious usage, the demon remains one of the West’s most enduring representations of evil and has acquired an increasingly potent place in the cosmologies of contemporary Christian nationalist movements in the United States and across the globe (O’Donnell, Passing). At the same time, the poetico-literary “afterlife” of demons catalyzed by (mis)readings of Milton’s Paradise Lost slowly shifted visions of the Devil and his cohorts from mere architects of evil to archetypes of rebellion (Faxneld; Luijk). This latter discourse, epitomized in the image of Milton’s Satan, is often encapsulated by the Latin Non Serviam—“I will not serve.” Allegedly uttered by the Devil at the instant of his rebellion, the phrase spoke of aspiration to mastery over, rather than servitude to, regnant order. Alasdair MacIntyre called it “Satan’s motto,” claiming that it signaled a rejection of established hierarchy (97), while Georges Bataille argued that it signified a “desire to accede to authentic being, to the sovereignty without which an individual or an action have no value in themselves, but are merely useful” (120). As Christian theology informs us, however, this desire was ultimately a doomed venture. At a time in which demonization has become central to mapping the global religious and political landscape, this article takes up the task of rethinking this doomed venture, not (only) in the narrative frame of Christian theology but in its (post)secular inheritors. It does so through a deconstructive reading of canto IX, lines 91–99 of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, using these verses as a lens through which to explore broader questions of demonization, subjectivity, and sovereignty that continue to structure our present. Recent works have demonstrated the continued influence of Christian demonology on modern systems of violence, dehumanization, and power (Kotsko; O’Donnell, Passing), and although exploring these systems through the lens of a trecento poem might initially seem odd, the place of Dante in the gradual secularization of religious and political concepts is widely acknowledged (Franke, Transgression). As a theologico-
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2021.1977568
Emily Yu Zong
In her acclaimed novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013, Tale hereafter), Japanese North American writer Ruth Ozeki expands her concerns for social and environmental justice. The novel interrogates a unified coordination of temporality by recuperating from history’s flotsam what is out of time and place. A barnacle encrusted plastic freezer bag containing a Japanese girl Nao’s diary is washed up by the currents of the Pacific Gyre onto the British Columbian coastline. It is picked up by a writer “Ruth” whose reading of the diary alters her own life trajectory and connects life stories and localities that are rarely acknowledged by conventional history. In one way or another, these repressed life stories reference broader events, including World War II, the dot-com bubble, 9/11, and the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami and Fukushima nuclear meltdown that, in Walter Benjamin's words, explode and “blast open the continuum of history” (396), troubling the notion of time being steady and progressive. While Nao’s diary is luckily saved by Ruth, other drifting relics depicted in the novel–tons of radioactive water released from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant and ever-expanding Great Garbage Patches in the world’s oceans–highlight traces of modernity and human impacts on the planet’s ecology that are irresolvable by historical reason. This article examines how Tale uses anachronism, or what appears untimely and asynchronous, to engage with the uneven temporalities of the Anthropocene. A key challenge the current ecological crises pose is a new temporal experience in which human historical time must now confront previously obscured temporalities such as deep time. Recent literary criticism addresses this challenge in expressing an anxiety that the novel–with its traditional focuses on realism and individual moral growth–might be limited to accommodate human agency at the enormous timescales of the current geological epoch called the Anthropocene (see Clark 2015; Ghosh 2016). With an eye to the temporal rhythms and scales needed to rethink the human, the conceptual tool of anachronism alludes to novelistic forms that attend to multiple temporalities and discontinuous histories. Tale is a novel that employs the idea of anachronism to illuminate the scale and nonanthropocentric focus of the Anthropocene. What appears untimely in the novel
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2021.1977565
Betty Jay
“More than half a century after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), news of a second novel from Harper Lee turned the 2015 emergence of Go Set a Watchman into an international literary event. Although marketed as a sequel to Mockingbird, Watchman was written in the mid-1950s and represented Lee’s first attempt at a novel. Subsequently set aside, it nonetheless provided the author with some of the key elements that would eventually feature in Mockingbird, not least through its focus on the Finch family and the small town of Maycomb, Alabama. For devotees of Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Watchman was clearly a tantalizing prospect, and, although some doubted whether Lee had been able to consent to publication, readers and critics alike recognized that a reading of Watchman and Mockingbird in tandem might lead to a better understanding of Lee’s artistic development. Certainly, for one such critic, Watchman inspired a renewed appreciation of Lee’s subsequent achievement:
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2021.1977566
Kenton Butcher
In a 2019 interview with Empire magazine, Martin Scorsese created a small controversy when he dismissed Marvel’s superhero films as “theme parks” rather than “the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being” (“The Irishman Week”). Scorsese’s remarks generated a buzz, and in November 2019, he wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he doubled down on his position. In the essay, he writes that Marvel films do not lack quality but instead lack “revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk.... They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit” (“I Said”). For Scorsese, this avoidance of risk stems from the movie industry’s aversion to loss on investment, so studios produce films that are “market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption” (“I Said”). The studios’ profit motive leads to the assembly-line production of franchise films that are known to make money, and this eliminates an essential component of cinema as Scorsese sees it: “the unifying vision of an individual artist,” which is the “riskiest factor of all” (“I Said”). As a result, Scorsese breaks down all contemporary films into two categories: “There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema” with Marvel films belonging to the former, inferior category (“I Said”). Although online apologists of Marvel Universe films paint Scorsese as an out of touch curmudgeon, his extensive knowledge of film history, insider’s perspective of the movie industry, and the sheer number of superhero films released over the past decade suggest he may be at least partially correct. At the time of writing this essay, since the release of Iron Man in 2008, twenty-three Marvel films have been released, grossing billions of dollars, with several more slated for production. Nor is Scorsese alone in his critique of Marvel films as uninspired tripe. Bill Nasson takes Black Panther to task along lines similar to Scorsese, lambasting the film’s formulaic plot, its cartoony computergenerated imagery, and its preachy dialogue. Although complimentary in regards to the film’s representation of Africa, Nasson’s essay characterizes
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2021.1977567
S. Hamilton
The zombie transforms the familiar human into an unfamiliar monster that is an unquenchably violent destroyer of the self. The zombie’s unyielding drive to destroy its counterpart represents how the human insatiable consumption of resources, seemingly without concern for consequence, is the result of an anthropocentric mentality of species elitism. This undying elitism privileges the human over the nonhuman as the perceived dominant species justified by the assumption that humans are uniquely capable of critical imagination and knowledge acquisition. M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014, Girl hereafter) appropriates the uncanny zombie figure as the potential damage humans inflict on themselves through the devastation of the ecological system that sustains their existence. Girl poses anthropocentric elitism as a potential cause of human extinction: humanity, no longer capable of evolving intellectually, becomes incompatible with the ever-changing environment on which they depend for existence. Girl opens in the Hotel Echo, a military-science facility operating approximately ten years after the onset of the “hungry plague,” a devastating pandemic that transformed a majority of humanity into “hungries” (Carey’s version of the zombie). The novel establishes the relationship between Melanie, one of a group of second generation sentient hungry children being examined to find a cure for the hungry plague, and her teacher Helen Justineau as a model for a beneficial interaction between human and nonhuman sentient species. Justineau’s mandate is to teach the students in a carceral classroom to evaluate their mental and psychological capacities. However, the primary objective of military-scientist Dr. Caroline Caldwell, director of Hotel Echo, is data acquisition through continuous gruesome laboratory dissections of the children: “Caldwell is very skilled at separating brains from skulls. She does it quickly and methodically, and she gets the brain out in one piece, with minimal tissue damage. She’s reached the point now where she could almost do it in her sleep” (41). The classroom provides the means for the novel to confront the seemingly increasing view of the incompatibility of scientific investigation and humanist critical inquiry (in both discipline and pedagogy). The Hotel Echo
{"title":"The Girl with All the Gifts: Eco-Zombiism, the Anthropocalypse, and Critical Lucidity","authors":"S. Hamilton","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1977567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1977567","url":null,"abstract":"The zombie transforms the familiar human into an unfamiliar monster that is an unquenchably violent destroyer of the self. The zombie’s unyielding drive to destroy its counterpart represents how the human insatiable consumption of resources, seemingly without concern for consequence, is the result of an anthropocentric mentality of species elitism. This undying elitism privileges the human over the nonhuman as the perceived dominant species justified by the assumption that humans are uniquely capable of critical imagination and knowledge acquisition. M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014, Girl hereafter) appropriates the uncanny zombie figure as the potential damage humans inflict on themselves through the devastation of the ecological system that sustains their existence. Girl poses anthropocentric elitism as a potential cause of human extinction: humanity, no longer capable of evolving intellectually, becomes incompatible with the ever-changing environment on which they depend for existence. Girl opens in the Hotel Echo, a military-science facility operating approximately ten years after the onset of the “hungry plague,” a devastating pandemic that transformed a majority of humanity into “hungries” (Carey’s version of the zombie). The novel establishes the relationship between Melanie, one of a group of second generation sentient hungry children being examined to find a cure for the hungry plague, and her teacher Helen Justineau as a model for a beneficial interaction between human and nonhuman sentient species. Justineau’s mandate is to teach the students in a carceral classroom to evaluate their mental and psychological capacities. However, the primary objective of military-scientist Dr. Caroline Caldwell, director of Hotel Echo, is data acquisition through continuous gruesome laboratory dissections of the children: “Caldwell is very skilled at separating brains from skulls. She does it quickly and methodically, and she gets the brain out in one piece, with minimal tissue damage. She’s reached the point now where she could almost do it in her sleep” (41). The classroom provides the means for the novel to confront the seemingly increasing view of the incompatibility of scientific investigation and humanist critical inquiry (in both discipline and pedagogy). The Hotel Echo","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"285 - 304"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45736518","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 : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2021.1941718
M. Farrant
From the vantage point of the archive, J.M. Coetzee’s literary oeuvre appears vexed by the question of the self in writing, or of writing as a repository of the self and its ineluctable baggage. Across three fictionalized memoirs, Coetzee’s literary selfarchiving is constructed through an epistemological dynamic of presenting and concealing that enables a revealing and masking of this self. More fundamentally, however, Coetzee also constructs an ontological dynamic of producing and erasing the self that is often overlooked. As Carrol Clarkson astutely argues in her review of J.C. Kannemeyer’s 2012 biography of Coetzee, to speak only of the presenting and concealing of “the ‘inner life’ of a person, as if it were something hidden from view, accessible to oneself only and not to others, is to run the risk of assuming some stable and inviolable ‘essence’ of a self that has no public mode of expression” (265). Indeed, Coetzee’s notion of “autre-biography” captures this sense of the self’s constitutive lack of self-sufficiency (Doubling 394), including in affective terms (I explore the impurity and contingency of Coetzee’s sense of affect below). This essay argues that both the epistemological-archival and ontologicalaffective displacements of Coetzee’s life-writing, specifically those of the third memoir Summertime (2009), epitomize his wider use of literary writing to reckon ethically with life as something inherently finite and limited, both in a biological and biographical sense. Although the first two memoirs, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002), can to a large extent be factually verified with the extant record of Coetzee’s biography, Summertime poses larger questions about literature as a mode of engaging with personal history. These questions address to what extent literature constitutes a form of truth or truth-seeking. As Clarkson subtly hints, that involves more
{"title":"Archival and Affective Displacements: The Ethics of Self-reflexivity, Shame, and Sacrifice in J.M. Coetzee’s Life-Writing","authors":"M. Farrant","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1941718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1941718","url":null,"abstract":"From the vantage point of the archive, J.M. Coetzee’s literary oeuvre appears vexed by the question of the self in writing, or of writing as a repository of the self and its ineluctable baggage. Across three fictionalized memoirs, Coetzee’s literary selfarchiving is constructed through an epistemological dynamic of presenting and concealing that enables a revealing and masking of this self. More fundamentally, however, Coetzee also constructs an ontological dynamic of producing and erasing the self that is often overlooked. As Carrol Clarkson astutely argues in her review of J.C. Kannemeyer’s 2012 biography of Coetzee, to speak only of the presenting and concealing of “the ‘inner life’ of a person, as if it were something hidden from view, accessible to oneself only and not to others, is to run the risk of assuming some stable and inviolable ‘essence’ of a self that has no public mode of expression” (265). Indeed, Coetzee’s notion of “autre-biography” captures this sense of the self’s constitutive lack of self-sufficiency (Doubling 394), including in affective terms (I explore the impurity and contingency of Coetzee’s sense of affect below). This essay argues that both the epistemological-archival and ontologicalaffective displacements of Coetzee’s life-writing, specifically those of the third memoir Summertime (2009), epitomize his wider use of literary writing to reckon ethically with life as something inherently finite and limited, both in a biological and biographical sense. Although the first two memoirs, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002), can to a large extent be factually verified with the extant record of Coetzee’s biography, Summertime poses larger questions about literature as a mode of engaging with personal history. These questions address to what extent literature constitutes a form of truth or truth-seeking. As Clarkson subtly hints, that involves more","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"173 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48561701","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 : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2021.1941719
M. Kendrick
Economic calculation and acts of exchange permeate All’s Well That Ends Well in its entirety, though this economic logic is frequently encoded within political, religious, and gender discourses. In a period before the formalization of an economic language, these other discourses serve to figure a nascent, and therefore conceptually unstable, economic value system. This intertwining of categories and discourses is evinced in the opening scene, when Helena and Paroles hold a conversation that is at once a discussion of female sexuality and a treatise on the nature and value of the commodity in a market society. According to Paroles, Helena’s preservation of her virginity not only goes against marriage custom but also violates economic rationality. Her virginity is “a commodity that will lose the gloss with lying: the longer kept, the less worth. Off with’t while ’tis vendible” (1.1.141–42). Paroles pressures Helena to “answer the time of request,” encouraging her to submit as a passive object of male desire (1.1.144–45). That Paroles goes on to compare her virginity to goods that have gone out of fashion like “the brooch and the toothpick” stresses the ephemeral value of virginity as a commodity (1.1.147). The way Paroles frames his exhortation, however, leaves open a space for ambiguity and resistance. After all, just how Helena answers the request or responds to demand requires a certain agency on her part. This ambiguity or tension between passivity and activity, objectification and subjectification, is in fact built into the multiplicity of meanings associated with the early modern usage of “commodity.” The term could, according to the OED, refer to “A thing produced for use or sale; a piece of merchandise; an article of commerce,” which would seem to be Paroles’ intended meaning. But it could also indicate “The quality or condition of being convenient, suitable, or useful,” a connotation that leaves room for agency to the extent that such a quality is a matter of perception, and perception is not static but open to manipulation. And thirdly, a commodity could also designate a prostitute, an association certainly implied by Paroles’ reduction of virginity to an object of commercial exchange and consumption (“Commodity, n.”). How Helena situates herself within this nexus of possible meanings about her status as a commodity shapes how we understand her role in the play.
{"title":"Being Vendible: Commodification and Agency in All’s Well That Ends Well","authors":"M. Kendrick","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1941719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1941719","url":null,"abstract":"Economic calculation and acts of exchange permeate All’s Well That Ends Well in its entirety, though this economic logic is frequently encoded within political, religious, and gender discourses. In a period before the formalization of an economic language, these other discourses serve to figure a nascent, and therefore conceptually unstable, economic value system. This intertwining of categories and discourses is evinced in the opening scene, when Helena and Paroles hold a conversation that is at once a discussion of female sexuality and a treatise on the nature and value of the commodity in a market society. According to Paroles, Helena’s preservation of her virginity not only goes against marriage custom but also violates economic rationality. Her virginity is “a commodity that will lose the gloss with lying: the longer kept, the less worth. Off with’t while ’tis vendible” (1.1.141–42). Paroles pressures Helena to “answer the time of request,” encouraging her to submit as a passive object of male desire (1.1.144–45). That Paroles goes on to compare her virginity to goods that have gone out of fashion like “the brooch and the toothpick” stresses the ephemeral value of virginity as a commodity (1.1.147). The way Paroles frames his exhortation, however, leaves open a space for ambiguity and resistance. After all, just how Helena answers the request or responds to demand requires a certain agency on her part. This ambiguity or tension between passivity and activity, objectification and subjectification, is in fact built into the multiplicity of meanings associated with the early modern usage of “commodity.” The term could, according to the OED, refer to “A thing produced for use or sale; a piece of merchandise; an article of commerce,” which would seem to be Paroles’ intended meaning. But it could also indicate “The quality or condition of being convenient, suitable, or useful,” a connotation that leaves room for agency to the extent that such a quality is a matter of perception, and perception is not static but open to manipulation. And thirdly, a commodity could also designate a prostitute, an association certainly implied by Paroles’ reduction of virginity to an object of commercial exchange and consumption (“Commodity, n.”). How Helena situates herself within this nexus of possible meanings about her status as a commodity shapes how we understand her role in the play.","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"192 - 211"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45534307","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 : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2021.1941720
Maxwell Woods
New investigations into “critical cosmopolitanism” (Rosenberg) and a “desire for the world” (Siskind) in modern Latin American literature follow a trend in much postmillenial scholarship renegotiating our understandings of cosmopolitanism and world literature. This debate about cosmopolitanism and the global travel of literature has appeared recently, for example, in criticism of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, with many writers focusing on its internationalism and interculturality. One particular mode of investigating such intercultural relations within Moby-Dick has been recently gaining ground: How has Moby-Dick been received outside the United States? Starting from this question, this article focuses on Moby-Dick’s reception in Chile and, more specifically, on its reception by Godofredo Iommi at the Open City of Ritoque: “a utopian community of architects and poets” (Latronico), as well as artists, scientists, and others, on the Pacific coast of Chile. My analysis is therefore situated between the United States and Chile, between Moby-Dick and the Open City. Founded in 1970, the Open City was formed by a group of faculty and students–most notably the Argentinian poet, Godofredo Iommi, and the Chilean architect, Alberto Cruz–from the School of Architecture and Design (EAD) at the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso (PUCV). The goal of the Open City was and is to found a space in which poetry, architecture, and urbanism are intimately related; within the City, architecture spatially articulates the mythical grounding for an urban conviviality that is generated through poetic revelation. The theoretical foundation of this group is an avant-garde epic poem, Amereida (1967), that they, along with other poets, philosophers, and artists from across the world, produced between 1965 to 1967 and whose stated purpose was to be “the Aeneid of America”: a founding myth on which to build an American culture and architecture (Jolly and Corea 8). Much of the literary focus of this group, as is made evident in Amereida, is dedicated to an investigation of the formation of a Latin American identity that struggles with the cultural inheritance of Eurocentric coloniality. As such, it should come as no surprise that North American literature receives no
{"title":"Literary Siblings, Decoloniality, and Delinking from the State: Reading Moby-Dick at the Open City of Ritoque, Chile","authors":"Maxwell Woods","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1941720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1941720","url":null,"abstract":"New investigations into “critical cosmopolitanism” (Rosenberg) and a “desire for the world” (Siskind) in modern Latin American literature follow a trend in much postmillenial scholarship renegotiating our understandings of cosmopolitanism and world literature. This debate about cosmopolitanism and the global travel of literature has appeared recently, for example, in criticism of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, with many writers focusing on its internationalism and interculturality. One particular mode of investigating such intercultural relations within Moby-Dick has been recently gaining ground: How has Moby-Dick been received outside the United States? Starting from this question, this article focuses on Moby-Dick’s reception in Chile and, more specifically, on its reception by Godofredo Iommi at the Open City of Ritoque: “a utopian community of architects and poets” (Latronico), as well as artists, scientists, and others, on the Pacific coast of Chile. My analysis is therefore situated between the United States and Chile, between Moby-Dick and the Open City. Founded in 1970, the Open City was formed by a group of faculty and students–most notably the Argentinian poet, Godofredo Iommi, and the Chilean architect, Alberto Cruz–from the School of Architecture and Design (EAD) at the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso (PUCV). The goal of the Open City was and is to found a space in which poetry, architecture, and urbanism are intimately related; within the City, architecture spatially articulates the mythical grounding for an urban conviviality that is generated through poetic revelation. The theoretical foundation of this group is an avant-garde epic poem, Amereida (1967), that they, along with other poets, philosophers, and artists from across the world, produced between 1965 to 1967 and whose stated purpose was to be “the Aeneid of America”: a founding myth on which to build an American culture and architecture (Jolly and Corea 8). Much of the literary focus of this group, as is made evident in Amereida, is dedicated to an investigation of the formation of a Latin American identity that struggles with the cultural inheritance of Eurocentric coloniality. As such, it should come as no surprise that North American literature receives no","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"212 - 230"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44687024","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}