“Kay Boyle has sold the Left Bank down the river” (“Pot-Boyler” 97). So opens a brief, unattributed review in Time Magazine of Avalanche: A Novel of Love and Espionage, a thriller by the American-born modernist Kay Boyle. Serialized, initially, in The Saturday Evening Post, the novel was published in 1944 as a standalone title and became Boyle’s only bestseller. Over a decade earlier, she had been affiliated with the Left Bank avant-garde magazine transition and was a signatory of its “The Revolution of the Word” (1929)—a manifesto asserting experimentalism as an author’s right. Later, she maintained she had endorsed the document, not to support stylistic innovation for its own sake, but to insist on writers’ freedom from market pressures. “The tradition of the artist, the creator,” should “outweigh” and “prevail” over a “materialistic, bourgeois tradition,” Boyle argued (qtd. in McAlmon 269). Despite appearances, then, her commercial turn during the Second World War was not simply a matter of abandoning previously held principles, as the review implies, but was tied to Boyle’s evolution as a committed writer. When Boyle moved from bohemian Paris to politically fraught Austria in 1933, her work began to reflect her strengthening social and political conscience as she witnessed the events leading up to the Anschluss. More
“凯·博伊尔已经把左岸卖到下游了”(“波伊勒”1997)。《时代》杂志对《雪崩:一部关于爱情与间谍的小说》的一篇简短的、未注明出处的评论就是这样开头的。《雪崩:一部关于爱情与间谍的小说》是美国出生的现代主义作家凯•博伊尔的惊悚小说。这部小说最初在《星期六晚邮报》(Saturday Evening Post)上连载，1944年以独立标题出版，成为博伊尔唯一的畅销书。十多年前，她加入了左岸先锋杂志《过渡》，并在1929年的《世界革命》(the Revolution of the Word)中署名，该宣言主张实验主义是作家的权利。后来，她坚称自己支持这份文件，不是为了支持文体创新，而是为了坚持作家不受市场压力的自由。博伊尔认为，“艺术家和创造者的传统”应该“压倒”并“战胜”“唯物主义的资产阶级传统”。见麦卡蒙269)。尽管外表如此，但她在二战期间的商业转型并不像评论所暗示的那样，仅仅是放弃了先前坚持的原则，而是与博伊尔作为一名忠诚作家的演变有关。1933年，博伊尔从波希米亚的巴黎搬到充满政治色彩的奥地利，她的作品开始反映出她日益增强的社会和政治良知，因为她目睹了导致德国合并的事件。更多的
{"title":"The Political Experiment of “Pot-Boylers”: Thinking, Feeling, and Romance in Kay Boyle’s Resistance Thriller Avalanche","authors":"Eric Keenaghan","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0015","url":null,"abstract":"“Kay Boyle has sold the Left Bank down the river” (“Pot-Boyler” 97). So opens a brief, unattributed review in Time Magazine of Avalanche: A Novel of Love and Espionage, a thriller by the American-born modernist Kay Boyle. Serialized, initially, in The Saturday Evening Post, the novel was published in 1944 as a standalone title and became Boyle’s only bestseller. Over a decade earlier, she had been affiliated with the Left Bank avant-garde magazine transition and was a signatory of its “The Revolution of the Word” (1929)—a manifesto asserting experimentalism as an author’s right. Later, she maintained she had endorsed the document, not to support stylistic innovation for its own sake, but to insist on writers’ freedom from market pressures. “The tradition of the artist, the creator,” should “outweigh” and “prevail” over a “materialistic, bourgeois tradition,” Boyle argued (qtd. in McAlmon 269). Despite appearances, then, her commercial turn during the Second World War was not simply a matter of abandoning previously held principles, as the review implies, but was tied to Boyle’s evolution as a committed writer. When Boyle moved from bohemian Paris to politically fraught Austria in 1933, her work began to reflect her strengthening social and political conscience as she witnessed the events leading up to the Anschluss. More","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"1 1","pages":"339 - 377"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84579921","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}
In a key chapter of The Things They Carried (1990), titled “How to Tell a True War Story,” Tim O’Brien’s fictional narrator—also named Tim O’Brien—turns to the general address of the second-person pronoun to put the reader into a character’s state of mind. You watch the “fluid symmetries,” O’Brien writes, the “harmonies of sound and shape and proportion.” What you see “fills the eye” and “commands you” with its “powerful, impeccable beauty.” Afterward, “there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. [. . .] You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by force of wanting it” (80–81). What you have just experienced is both absolutely true and not at all true, and as you leave it behind you feel vitalized by a universe reordered:
{"title":"A Kinetoscope of War: The Cinematic Effects of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried","authors":"Alex Vernon","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0008","url":null,"abstract":"In a key chapter of The Things They Carried (1990), titled “How to Tell a True War Story,” Tim O’Brien’s fictional narrator—also named Tim O’Brien—turns to the general address of the second-person pronoun to put the reader into a character’s state of mind. You watch the “fluid symmetries,” O’Brien writes, the “harmonies of sound and shape and proportion.” What you see “fills the eye” and “commands you” with its “powerful, impeccable beauty.” Afterward, “there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. [. . .] You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by force of wanting it” (80–81). What you have just experienced is both absolutely true and not at all true, and as you leave it behind you feel vitalized by a universe reordered:","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"18 1","pages":"194 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85789661","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}
{"title":"A Passage from Adam's Dream to the Cessation of Desire: A Buddhist Reading of John Keats's \"Ode to a Nightingale\"","authors":"Carol L. Yang","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"143 1","pages":"137 - 163"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80261608","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}
Within the relatively brief history of video games and their scholarly study, many critics and players have long lamented their regressive gender roles—and rightfully so. Various games rely on hackneyed narrative trajectories depicting male agency and female passivity, in which male protagonists rescue female damsels in distress who are often drawn as exaggerated and eroticized objects of male lust. As Peter Buse laments in his groundbreaking 1996 study, “video game narratives are predictable and depressing when it comes to sexual politics: with a few notable exceptions, like Tetris and other nongendered games, they rather crudely reproduce the worst-case scenario of patriarchal gender relations” (166). The passage of years has witnessed remarkable shifts in computing technologies and, consequently, the complexity of video games in their play, storylines, and interactivity, yet accusations of sexism still rightfully highlight the need for more forceful interventions into their antifeminist conventions. More recently, Adrienne Shaw, addressing gaming’s enduring legacy of gendered stereotypes, observes “that gender and sexuality are statically defined” in many games, resulting in an “oppressive world view defin[ing] the very structure of the game” (32).1 The persistent cultural image of males as the primary consumers of video games perpetuates these conventions as well, relegating females to a secondary position both within many games’ storylines and within the playing communities of the video game phenomenon.
{"title":"The Queer Narrativity of the Hero's Journey in Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda Video Games","authors":"T. Pugh","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Within the relatively brief history of video games and their scholarly study, many critics and players have long lamented their regressive gender roles—and rightfully so. Various games rely on hackneyed narrative trajectories depicting male agency and female passivity, in which male protagonists rescue female damsels in distress who are often drawn as exaggerated and eroticized objects of male lust. As Peter Buse laments in his groundbreaking 1996 study, “video game narratives are predictable and depressing when it comes to sexual politics: with a few notable exceptions, like Tetris and other nongendered games, they rather crudely reproduce the worst-case scenario of patriarchal gender relations” (166). The passage of years has witnessed remarkable shifts in computing technologies and, consequently, the complexity of video games in their play, storylines, and interactivity, yet accusations of sexism still rightfully highlight the need for more forceful interventions into their antifeminist conventions. More recently, Adrienne Shaw, addressing gaming’s enduring legacy of gendered stereotypes, observes “that gender and sexuality are statically defined” in many games, resulting in an “oppressive world view defin[ing] the very structure of the game” (32).1 The persistent cultural image of males as the primary consumers of video games perpetuates these conventions as well, relegating females to a secondary position both within many games’ storylines and within the playing communities of the video game phenomenon.","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"14 1","pages":"225 - 251"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78366923","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}
Edgar Allan Poe’s significance as a short story writer has been duly noted by critics. The voluminous criticism his stories received (and continue to receive) attests to the widely acknowledged importance of the writer. However, in comparison with his individual works, Poe’s devotion primarily to short story writing in his brief but very productive career has elicited far less attention. Critics sometimes refer to the market potential of the genre as a strong motivation,1 which is at least partly true, but we must take into account nonfinancial considerations as well. Otherwise, we may not be able to explain why Poe decided to stay with the genre when other contemporary short story writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, gradually shifted to novel writing. Nor does the market theory of Poe’s genre choice adequately explain why Poe showed such unswerving commitment to the genre in theory, praising its aesthetic value at every turn. To answer these questions, we need to place Poe’s creative and critical efforts with respect to short story writing in a larger transatlantic context, in which American writers felt compelled to justify the distinctiveness and independence of American literature. Contrary to popular belief, I believe that Poe embraced the idea of a national literature as eagerly as many renowned literary nationalists, but instead of advocating thematic localization, Poe supported formal innovation, and turned to the short story as the primary
{"title":"Ambiguity as Aesthetic Strategy: Edgar Allan Poe's Ambitions for the American Short Story","authors":"Wanlin Li","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Edgar Allan Poe’s significance as a short story writer has been duly noted by critics. The voluminous criticism his stories received (and continue to receive) attests to the widely acknowledged importance of the writer. However, in comparison with his individual works, Poe’s devotion primarily to short story writing in his brief but very productive career has elicited far less attention. Critics sometimes refer to the market potential of the genre as a strong motivation,1 which is at least partly true, but we must take into account nonfinancial considerations as well. Otherwise, we may not be able to explain why Poe decided to stay with the genre when other contemporary short story writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, gradually shifted to novel writing. Nor does the market theory of Poe’s genre choice adequately explain why Poe showed such unswerving commitment to the genre in theory, praising its aesthetic value at every turn. To answer these questions, we need to place Poe’s creative and critical efforts with respect to short story writing in a larger transatlantic context, in which American writers felt compelled to justify the distinctiveness and independence of American literature. Contrary to popular belief, I believe that Poe embraced the idea of a national literature as eagerly as many renowned literary nationalists, but instead of advocating thematic localization, Poe supported formal innovation, and turned to the short story as the primary","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"301 1","pages":"164 - 193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76522420","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}
Zombie stories typically hinge on some post-apocalyptic conceit and challenge readers and viewers by holding up an analytical, at times satirical, lens on the ruins of the world we know—or think we know—to reveal some damning pathology in this transformation. Depending on the tale, zombies, embattled survivors of the zombie plague, or some combination of the two, reveal social ills and cultural anxieties through the savagery of their actions: the rampant consumerist society in Dawn of the Dead, the Cold War isolationism and racism in Night of the Living Dead, the unchecked militarism in 28 Days Later, or the global pandemic in World War Z, to name a few. Typical of the genre in film and fiction, what we will refer to as post-Romero political satire, is this return to everyday spaces, with their quotidian geographies that, when populated by mindless, savage, remorseless, and tormented beings, might strike us as unnervingly reminiscent of our own reality. The 1968 release of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead introduced the iconic modern zombie: a slow-moving, flesh-eating reanimated undead creature that can only die if its brain is destroyed. Romero’s films are credited with invigorating the genre as a vehicle for social commentary, and he is widely recognized as “a radical critic of contemporary American culture [who] gleefully uncovers the hidden structures of our society in the course of charting the progress of its disintegration” (Shaviro 82).2 This essay maps one trajectory of the post-Romero genre within the zombie narrative tradition at a
{"title":"\"How Do You Not Understand a Word?\": Language as Contagion and Cure in Pontypool","authors":"Sharon J. Kirsch, Michael Stancliff","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Zombie stories typically hinge on some post-apocalyptic conceit and challenge readers and viewers by holding up an analytical, at times satirical, lens on the ruins of the world we know—or think we know—to reveal some damning pathology in this transformation. Depending on the tale, zombies, embattled survivors of the zombie plague, or some combination of the two, reveal social ills and cultural anxieties through the savagery of their actions: the rampant consumerist society in Dawn of the Dead, the Cold War isolationism and racism in Night of the Living Dead, the unchecked militarism in 28 Days Later, or the global pandemic in World War Z, to name a few. Typical of the genre in film and fiction, what we will refer to as post-Romero political satire, is this return to everyday spaces, with their quotidian geographies that, when populated by mindless, savage, remorseless, and tormented beings, might strike us as unnervingly reminiscent of our own reality. The 1968 release of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead introduced the iconic modern zombie: a slow-moving, flesh-eating reanimated undead creature that can only die if its brain is destroyed. Romero’s films are credited with invigorating the genre as a vehicle for social commentary, and he is widely recognized as “a radical critic of contemporary American culture [who] gleefully uncovers the hidden structures of our society in the course of charting the progress of its disintegration” (Shaviro 82).2 This essay maps one trajectory of the post-Romero genre within the zombie narrative tradition at a","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"19 1","pages":"252 - 278"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79481009","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}
From the moment Fred Astaire arrived in Los Angeles in 1933, studio executives and Hollywood columnists wondered, both privately and publicly, whether a ‘homely,’ ‘skinny,’ ‘sophisticated’ dancer would be able to function as a leading man. The fact that the answer proved to be a resounding yes has been largely credited to the woman who danced by Astaire’s side in nine of his first eleven film outings.1 According to John Mueller, for instance, “the reason so many women have fantasized about dancing with Fred Astaire is that Ginger Rogers conveyed the impression that dancing with him is the most thrilling experience imaginable” (8-9), while according to Katharine Hepburn, more famously and more cuttingly, the basis of Astaire and Rogers’ unprecedented collaborative success is that “He gives her class; she gives him sex” (qtd. in Levinson 75). Egalitarian as Hepburn’s quid pro quo parsing of the partnership may be, the Astaire-Rogers films do much to undermine the neatness of such a dichotomy. As Margaret T. McFadden has noted, the characters played by Astaire are often required to shake off their “effete, highbrow” ways and embrace Rogers’ earthier, more working-class aesthetic by the films’ endings (693); if anything, according to this reading and others like it, Rogers “gives” Astaire the right kind of “class” to please Depression-era viewers.2 What interests me in this article, though, is the giving of sex rather than of class. While I agree with Katharine Hepburn that it was Astaire who stood as the primary
从弗雷德·阿斯泰尔(Fred Astaire) 1933年来到洛杉矶的那一刻起，电影公司高管和好莱坞专栏作家们就在私下和公开场合怀疑，一个“普通”、“瘦削”、“老练”的舞者能否胜任男主角的角色。事实证明，答案是肯定的，这在很大程度上要归功于在阿斯泰尔前11次电影外出中有9次在他身边跳舞的那个女人例如，根据约翰·穆勒(John Mueller)的说法，“这么多女性幻想与弗雷德·阿斯泰尔(Fred Astaire)跳舞的原因是金格·罗杰斯(Ginger Rogers)给人的印象是，与他跳舞是你能想象到的最激动人心的经历”(8-9)，而根据凯瑟琳·赫本(Katharine Hepburn)更著名、更敏锐的说法，阿斯泰尔和罗杰斯史无前例的合作成功的基础是“他给她上了课;她和他做爱。”在莱文森75)。赫本对这种伙伴关系的交换条件分析可能是平等主义的，阿斯泰尔-罗杰斯的电影在很大程度上破坏了这种二分法的整洁性。正如玛格丽特·t·麦克法登(Margaret T. McFadden)所指出的，阿斯泰尔扮演的角色往往被要求摆脱他们“腐朽、高雅”的方式，在电影的结尾接受罗杰斯更朴实、更工人阶级的审美(693);如果有什么不同的话，根据这篇文章和其他类似的文章，罗杰斯“赋予”了阿斯泰尔正确的“阶级”，以取悦大萧条时期的观众然而，这篇文章让我感兴趣的是性的给予，而不是阶级的给予。虽然我同意凯瑟琳·赫本的观点，但阿斯泰尔是第一位的
{"title":"Sex and the Storyworld: Narrativizing Desirability in the Early Films of Fred Astaire","authors":"Nora Gilbert","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0001","url":null,"abstract":"From the moment Fred Astaire arrived in Los Angeles in 1933, studio executives and Hollywood columnists wondered, both privately and publicly, whether a ‘homely,’ ‘skinny,’ ‘sophisticated’ dancer would be able to function as a leading man. The fact that the answer proved to be a resounding yes has been largely credited to the woman who danced by Astaire’s side in nine of his first eleven film outings.1 According to John Mueller, for instance, “the reason so many women have fantasized about dancing with Fred Astaire is that Ginger Rogers conveyed the impression that dancing with him is the most thrilling experience imaginable” (8-9), while according to Katharine Hepburn, more famously and more cuttingly, the basis of Astaire and Rogers’ unprecedented collaborative success is that “He gives her class; she gives him sex” (qtd. in Levinson 75). Egalitarian as Hepburn’s quid pro quo parsing of the partnership may be, the Astaire-Rogers films do much to undermine the neatness of such a dichotomy. As Margaret T. McFadden has noted, the characters played by Astaire are often required to shake off their “effete, highbrow” ways and embrace Rogers’ earthier, more working-class aesthetic by the films’ endings (693); if anything, according to this reading and others like it, Rogers “gives” Astaire the right kind of “class” to please Depression-era viewers.2 What interests me in this article, though, is the giving of sex rather than of class. While I agree with Katharine Hepburn that it was Astaire who stood as the primary","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"2 3","pages":"29 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JNT.2018.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72377557","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}
In the last decades, intertextuality has been used to question issues of gender identity and desire, and, in a lively dialogue with theoretical debates within feminist thought, has come to define women’s writing. An early example of such intertextuality is the rewriting of the female subject in Angela Carter’s spectacular novel Nights at the Circus (1984). Fevvers, the self-proclaimed bird woman found at the door of a brothel, hatched from an egg, raised by prostitutes, and trained by the witch-like anarchist Lizzie, wanders around the world, traversing alternative communities, ideologies, and the world of fiction, while exploring the feminine experience in relation to her indeterminate female body symbolized by her alleged wings and searching for a place and language for the new woman. The figure of the woman writer in confrontation with the literary heritage is ubiquitous in contemporary women’s writing; a recent example is Kate Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird (2000), a postmodern novel that produces its new woman by rewriting and questioning the realist novel. Unlike most of their fictive predecessors in the realist novel, who begin as single women and end up in socially appropriate, acceptable heterosexual marriages, the female protagonists of postmodern fiction strive to break free of both their biological roots and the marriage institution and stage female experience in the discursive field. While exposing the inadequacy of traditional literary forms and their implicit gender norms, this figure of the woman writer in search of a language offers a viable, desirable form of female existence instead.1 Sarah Waters’s 2002 Fingersmith is another example of a novel whose playful discursive production of the woman writer illustrates the
{"title":"Masquerade in Fingersmith","authors":"H. Yurttaş","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0004","url":null,"abstract":"In the last decades, intertextuality has been used to question issues of gender identity and desire, and, in a lively dialogue with theoretical debates within feminist thought, has come to define women’s writing. An early example of such intertextuality is the rewriting of the female subject in Angela Carter’s spectacular novel Nights at the Circus (1984). Fevvers, the self-proclaimed bird woman found at the door of a brothel, hatched from an egg, raised by prostitutes, and trained by the witch-like anarchist Lizzie, wanders around the world, traversing alternative communities, ideologies, and the world of fiction, while exploring the feminine experience in relation to her indeterminate female body symbolized by her alleged wings and searching for a place and language for the new woman. The figure of the woman writer in confrontation with the literary heritage is ubiquitous in contemporary women’s writing; a recent example is Kate Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird (2000), a postmodern novel that produces its new woman by rewriting and questioning the realist novel. Unlike most of their fictive predecessors in the realist novel, who begin as single women and end up in socially appropriate, acceptable heterosexual marriages, the female protagonists of postmodern fiction strive to break free of both their biological roots and the marriage institution and stage female experience in the discursive field. While exposing the inadequacy of traditional literary forms and their implicit gender norms, this figure of the woman writer in search of a language offers a viable, desirable form of female existence instead.1 Sarah Waters’s 2002 Fingersmith is another example of a novel whose playful discursive production of the woman writer illustrates the","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"4 1","pages":"109 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88459419","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}
Octavia Butler died in late February of 2006 following a fall outside of her home, the house a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant enabled her to purchase. This freak accident, a tragedy for anyone touched by her writing, serves as an appropriate reminder of many of Butler’s most significant themes. Like any death, hers foregrounds our mortality and by doing so also foregrounds our relation to others—an ethical connection that is so central to her writing. Butler wrote of division and violence; of the dichotomy between the self and the objective world, home and otherness; and of what could be gained and lost by decreasing the distance between others. In her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, Butler writes of a young girl, locked behind neighborhood walls in an apocalyptic world, who is gifted, and cursed, with empathy; she can experience others’ pain, real or feigned (11). Lauren Olamina’s hyperempathy is a disability as it marks her out as other and interferes with her ability to easily navigate and succeed in a violently hierarchized world. Yet Lauren does succeed while retaining her empathic connection to the world. Lauren has a strong sense of her identity, yet fosters a connection to others at the same time. Here we have what appears to be a perfect ethical balance between assuring a certain level of personal singularity, without the violent hermeneutic assimilation of others. What more can we ask of any ethics? I demonstrate how in Butler’s Kindred disability amounts to a sort of
奥克塔维亚·巴特勒于2006年2月底在她的房子外面摔倒后去世，这是麦克阿瑟基金会天才基金使她能够购买的房子。对于任何被她的作品打动的人来说，这一怪异的事故都是一场悲剧，它恰当地提醒了巴特勒许多最重要的主题。就像任何死亡一样，她的死亡凸显了我们的死亡，同时也凸显了我们与他人的关系——这是她作品的核心所在。巴特勒写的是分裂和暴力;自我和客观世界、家和他者之间的二分法;以及通过减少人与人之间的距离可以得到什么和失去什么。在她1993年的小说《播种者的寓言》(Parable of the Sower)中，巴特勒描写了一个年轻女孩，她被锁在社区的围墙后面，身处一个末日世界，她有天赋，也被诅咒，有同理心;她能体会别人的痛苦，无论是真实的还是假装的。劳伦·奥拉米纳(Lauren Olamina)的超同理心是一种残疾，因为它将她与他人区分开来，妨碍了她在一个暴力等级森严的世界中轻松导航并取得成功的能力。然而，劳伦在保持与世界的共情联系的同时，确实取得了成功。劳伦有很强的自我意识，但同时也培养了与他人的联系。在这里，我们看到了一种完美的道德平衡，既保证了一定程度的个人独特性，又没有对他人的暴力解释学同化。我们还能要求什么道德规范呢?我在巴特勒的《亲族》中展示了残疾是如何形成一种
{"title":"The Domestic Politics of Disability in Octavia Butler's Kindred","authors":"T. Comer","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Octavia Butler died in late February of 2006 following a fall outside of her home, the house a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant enabled her to purchase. This freak accident, a tragedy for anyone touched by her writing, serves as an appropriate reminder of many of Butler’s most significant themes. Like any death, hers foregrounds our mortality and by doing so also foregrounds our relation to others—an ethical connection that is so central to her writing. Butler wrote of division and violence; of the dichotomy between the self and the objective world, home and otherness; and of what could be gained and lost by decreasing the distance between others. In her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, Butler writes of a young girl, locked behind neighborhood walls in an apocalyptic world, who is gifted, and cursed, with empathy; she can experience others’ pain, real or feigned (11). Lauren Olamina’s hyperempathy is a disability as it marks her out as other and interferes with her ability to easily navigate and succeed in a violently hierarchized world. Yet Lauren does succeed while retaining her empathic connection to the world. Lauren has a strong sense of her identity, yet fosters a connection to others at the same time. Here we have what appears to be a perfect ethical balance between assuring a certain level of personal singularity, without the violent hermeneutic assimilation of others. What more can we ask of any ethics? I demonstrate how in Butler’s Kindred disability amounts to a sort of","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"163 1","pages":"108 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80277309","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}
{"title":"Nabokov's Gradual and Dual Blues: Taxonomy, Unreliability, and Ethics in Lolita","authors":"Daniel A. Newman","doi":"10.1353/JNT.2018.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JNT.2018.0002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42787,"journal":{"name":"JNT-JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY","volume":"175 1","pages":"53 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2018-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72678289","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}
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