Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tyr.2023.a908682
Sanjena Sathian
The Choice PlotWhy are so many novels reckoning with whether to have children? Sanjena Sathian (bio) Imagined children loom over my life of late. They haunt nearly every conversation as my circle collectively wonders whether, when, and how to procreate. There is the friend weighing climate pessimism and a meager paycheck against his love of kids. The friend who watches graphic birthing videos as a form of contraception. The doctor friend, once eager for babies, who sees ectopic pregnancies and septic miscarriages and deems [End Page 132] gestation too risky after Dobbs. The friend who worries he won't be able to adopt as an unpartnered gay man. The child-free queer friends feeling betrayed by other queers' baby fever. The friend who joins a "committee," complete with Zoom calls and pitch decks, to help a single woman pick a sperm donor. The friend who keeps her abortion secret; it is a season of babies, not terminations. The friend whose miscarriage is so physically excruciating it makes her reconsider "trying" again. The friend freezing embryos as truce in a long battle with her husband: he is ready for children now; she may never want them. The friend freezing eggs who absconds to the bathroom at a wedding to administer her hormone shots. Millennials did not invent waffling about reproduction, but we have put our generational spin on a familiar story. Twenty-first-century social norms and fertility technologies let us postpone childbearing; our equivocation is still further protracted because our reproductive years have been marked by recessions and environmental catastrophes, in light of which having kids can seem impossible or immoral. All this is to say nothing of the wild swings in our rights. I began my twenties in an age of procreative optimism, forty years after Roe v. Wade, when commercial egg freezing and gay marriage alike were new. I turned thirty months before the Supreme Court overturned Roe; threatened contraception, fertility treatments, and miscarriage care; and began to erode queer rights. The contemporary American paradox: we live in an age of medically expanded but legally diminished choice. Inevitably, in the United States and beyond, novelists are taking up the dilemmas of twenty-first-century procreation. There has been a slew of recent novels about pregnancy and reproductive choice. Among the newest are Louisa Hall's Reproduction (2023), about a Frankenstein-obsessed novelist's pregnancy, and Ashley Wurzbacher's How to Care for a Human Girl (2023), about two sisters who get pregnant simultaneously. Fiction is particularly suited to addressing the quandaries of choice. Interiority and free indirect discourse allow readers to gain intimacy with characters' ambivalent worldviews, while scene and plot let writers dramatize [End Page 133] multiple perspectives and eschew polemic. An ability to represent paradox may in fact be the novel's greatest ethical power. Of course, these contemporary books have ancestors. "The novel has
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tyr.2023.a908673
Alec Pollak
Hansberry OffstageThe playwright's lesbian writings Alec Pollak (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution David Attie, contact sheets of Lorraine Hansberry portrait session, 1959. David Attie/Archive Photos via Getty Images. [End Page 60] With each passing year, Lorraine Hansberry rests more comfortably on her laurels. She is secure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literary greats, unequivocally a foremother of Black American drama. This has not always been the case: Hansberry died young, a one-hit wonder and widely misunderstood. A Raisin in the Sun, her 1959 play about a Black American family's struggle against housing segregation, made her the first Broadway-produced Black woman playwright and the youngest-ever winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Hansberry's politics may have been far-left, but audiences [End Page 61] understood Raisin as a liberal paean to assimilation. As Black art and politics took an increasingly militant turn in the years after Hansberry's death, her popularity waned. Thanks to the tireless work of her literary estate—headed in its early years by her ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff—Hansberry never slipped entirely out of print or public consciousness, but her afterlife has been full of false starts. Critics, eager to explain away a young Black woman who challenged the limits of their understanding, have been quick to write off Hansberry's oeuvre beyond Raisin as "the poor remnants of an unfinished life." As a result, Hansberry's life and influence have come in and out of focus since her death in 1965: she has been rediscovered each decade, celebrated, and then sidelined anew. Today, we are in the midst of a Hansberry renaissance that one hopes will be her last. Since 2014, three biographies, two documentaries, and a half-dozen exhibitions, commemorative works, and awards-nominated theater revivals have recovered what Soyica Diggs Colbert has called Hansberry's "radical vision" as an enduring source of wisdom for the present. For the first time, Hansberry's sexuality has emerged as a meaningful component of her identity, one that demands consideration in any account of her life and work. The timing isn't a coincidence: in 2014, the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust avowed publicly that Hansberry was a lesbian and greenlit an unprecedented number of projects. Since then, ten years of commemorative works have reinvented Hansberry as a prophet of feminism, postcolonialism, LGBTQ rights, and Black nationalism who lived an extraordinarily full life, despite her untimely death. With unprecedented access to Hansberry's archive and an engaged, obliging literary estate, the story of Hansberry's multidimensional life seems finally within reach. But the work of understanding her life is far from over. Recent biographers have acknowledged Hansberry's lesbianism, but they have not plumbed the depths of her queer archive or reckoned with her sexuality on Hansberry's own terms: as the "great personal contradiction"
舞台下剧作家的女同性恋作品亚历克·波拉克(传记)点击查看大图查看全分辨率大卫·阿蒂，洛林·汉斯伯里肖像会议的联系表，1959年。大卫·阿蒂/档案照片通过盖蒂图片。随着时间的流逝，洛林·汉斯伯里更加舒适地享受着她的荣誉。她在20世纪文学伟人的万神殿中占有一席之地，毫无疑问，她是美国黑人戏剧的鼻祖。但事实并非总是如此:汉斯伯里英年早逝，是昙花一现的奇迹，被广泛误解。1959年，她的戏剧《太阳下的葡萄干》(A Raisin the Sun)讲述了一个美国黑人家庭反对住房隔离的斗争，使她成为百老汇第一位黑人女剧作家，也是纽约戏剧评论家圈奖(New York Drama Critics’Circle Award)有史以来最年轻的获奖者。汉斯伯里的政治主张可能是极左翼的，但观众却把《葡萄干》理解为对同化的自由主义赞歌。在汉斯伯里死后的几年里，黑人艺术和政治变得越来越激进，她的受欢迎程度也在下降。由于她的文学遗产(早年由她的前夫掌管)孜孜不倦的工作，罗伯特·内米罗夫-汉斯伯里从未完全从出版物或公众意识中消失，但她的死后却充满了错误的开端。评论家们急于为这位挑战他们理解极限的年轻黑人女性开脱，他们很快就把汉斯伯里在《葡萄干》之外的全部作品斥为“未完成生命的可怜残余物”。因此，自1965年汉斯伯里去世以来，她的生活和影响就时而受到关注，时而淡出人们的视线:她每十年都被重新发现，被庆祝，然后再次被边缘化。今天，我们正处于汉斯伯里的复兴之中，人们希望这将是她的最后一次复兴。自2014年以来，汉斯伯里的三部传记、两部纪录片、六场展览、纪念作品和获奖提名的戏剧复兴，恢复了索伊卡·迪格斯·科尔伯特(Soyica Diggs Colbert)所称的“激进愿景”，成为当今智慧的持久源泉。汉斯伯里的性取向第一次成为她身份的一个有意义的组成部分，在任何对她生活和工作的描述中都需要考虑到这一点。这个时机并非巧合:2014年，洛林·汉斯伯里文学信托基金会公开承认汉斯伯里是女同性恋，并为空前数量的项目开绿灯。从那以后，10年的纪念作品将汉斯伯里重塑为女权主义、后殖民主义、LGBTQ权利和黑人民族主义的先知，尽管她英年早逝，但她的一生非常充实。随着对汉斯伯里档案的前所未有的访问，以及一个忙碌的、乐于助人的文学遗产，汉斯伯里多维度生活的故事似乎终于触手可及。但了解她生活的工作远未结束。最近的传记作家已经承认了汉斯伯里的女同性恋身份，但他们并没有深入研究她的同性恋档案，也没有用汉斯伯里自己的方式来看待她的性取向:作为她生活中“巨大的个人矛盾”。汉斯伯里通过一系列以女同性恋为主题的故事探索了这种“巨大的个人矛盾”，其中四篇以笔名艾米丽·琼斯(Emily Jones)发表在早期的同性恋杂志《阶梯》(the Ladder)和《ONE》(ONE)上。这四个故事，加上她最近的传记作者引用的日记和信件的片段，是当代评论家了解汉斯伯里性取向的主要材料。但汉斯伯里写这些故事的时候，她自称是同性恋的“童年”，而这些故事只是她酷儿作品的一小部分。汉斯伯里更丰富的女同性恋故事可以在一些未发表的故事和戏剧中找到，这些故事和戏剧收藏在她在朔姆伯格黑人文化研究中心的论文中，她探讨了她的同性恋的演变，它在她生活中的作用，以及它与她身份的其他方面的兼容性。与她关于女权主义、反殖民主义和黑人问题的主要著作不同，她的许多作品都已出版并被广泛关注，而这些故事基本上没有被触及。在过去十年的重新评价中，汉斯伯里是无所畏惧的、完全形成的——她对“同性恋问题”的看法与对女权主义、殖民主义和黑人解放的看法一样清晰、分析敏锐。“在女权主义运动之前，她就是一个女权主义者，”伊玛尼解释说。
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tyr.2023.a908684
Maggie Doherty
More than MagazinesMs., Sassy, and fifty years of feminism Maggie Doherty (bio) Nearly all resolutions start with a meeting. When a group of female journalists gathered at Gloria Steinem's uptown Manhattan apartment in the winter of 1971, they were facing a common problem: none of them could get "real stories about women published." The male editors of the major women's magazines—called the "seven sisters," like the colleges—would not accept pitches that did anything other than advise readers to be better, happier, more productive housewives and mothers. General-interest publications, also edited by men, were no better: according to Steinem, her editor at The New York Times Sunday Magazine rejected all her pitches for political stories, saying "something like, [End Page 158] 'I don't think of you that way.'" Fed up and fired up, the journalists decided to start their own publication. But what kind of publication would they create, and for what kind of reader? Steinem proposed a newsletter, the kind of low-budget, low-circulation flyer that many feminist groups in New York City favored. But the lawyer and activist Brenda Feigen suggested something different: "We should do a slick magazine," something colorful and glossy that could be sold on newsstands nationwide. Not everyone was keen on the idea. As Vivian Gornick recalled forty years later, "Radical feminists like me, Ellen Willis, and Jill Johnston...had a different kind of magazine in mind," one that might argue against the institutions of marriage and motherhood. When it became clear that Steinem and others "wanted a glossy that would appeal to the women who read the Ladies' Home Journal," Gornick and her radical sisters bowed out. But others hoped that a glossy magazine might strengthen the feminist movement. Letty Cottin Pogrebin thought a slick magazine could be "a stealth strategy to 'normalize' or 'mainstream' our message." As a riposte to The New York Times, which until 1986 refused to refer to a woman by anything other than "Mrs." or "Miss," they decided to call their magazine Ms. The project was ambitious, quixotic, and, historically speaking, unusual. If the newsletter was the preferred form for revolutionary feminist publishing in the late 1960s, the glossy magazine was the form of the prevailing social order. While the radical feminist group Redstockings distributed newsletters and working papers—"mimeographed thunderbolts," they called them—at its consciousnessraising meetings, Ladies' Home Journal was publishing a regular advice column—"Can This Marriage Be Saved?"—in which male editors advised unhappy women, some of whom were stuck in abusive relationships, on how to be better wives. (On March 18, 1970, more than a hundred women staged an eleven-hour sit-in at the Ladies' Home Journal offices, protesting the advice column, the "exploitative" advertisements, the magazine's all-male editorial team, and the lack of childcare for female staffers.) Newsletters [End Page 159] could b
不仅仅是杂志。玛吉·多尔蒂(传记)几乎所有的新年决心都是从一次会议开始的。1971年冬天，当一群女记者聚集在格洛丽亚·斯泰纳姆(Gloria Steinem)位于曼哈顿上城区的公寓里时，她们面临着一个共同的问题:没有一个人能“发表关于女性的真实故事”。主要女性杂志的男性编辑——和大学一样被称为“七姐妹”——除了建议读者成为更好、更快乐、更有成效的家庭主妇和母亲之外，不会接受任何其他的宣传。同样由男性编辑的大众出版物也好不到哪里去:据斯泰纳姆说，她在《纽约时报周日杂志》(The New York Times Sunday Magazine)的编辑拒绝了她所有关于政治故事的提议，说“类似这样的话，‘我不这么看你。’”这些记者受够了，也被激怒了，他们决定创办自己的刊物。但是他们会为什么样的读者创造什么样的出版物呢?斯泰纳姆提议制作一份时事通讯，这种低成本、低发行量的传单受到纽约市许多女权主义团体的青睐。但律师兼活动家布伦达·费根(Brenda Feigen)提出了不同的建议:“我们应该做一本光鲜亮丽的杂志”，那种色彩丰富、光鲜亮丽的杂志，可以在全国各地的报摊上出售。并不是每个人都喜欢这个想法。正如维维安·戈尔尼克四十年后回忆的那样，“像我、艾伦·威利斯和吉尔·约翰斯顿这样的激进女权主义者……心中有一本不同的杂志，“一本可能会反对婚姻和母性制度的杂志。”当斯泰纳姆和其他人“想要一种能够吸引阅读《妇女家庭杂志》的女性的杂志”变得很明显时，戈尔尼克和她的激进姐妹们退出了。但也有人希望一本光鲜亮丽的杂志能加强女权运动。莱蒂·科廷·波格里宾认为，一本精美的杂志可能是“一种使我们的信息‘正常化’或‘主流化’的秘密策略”。《纽约时报》直到1986年都拒绝用“夫人”或“小姐”以外的称呼称呼女性，作为对《纽约时报》的反击，他们决定把自己的杂志命名为“女士”。这个项目雄心勃勃，不切实际，从历史上讲，也很不寻常。如果说时事通讯是20世纪60年代末革命女权主义出版的首选形式，那么光鲜亮丽的杂志就是主流社会秩序的形式。激进的女权主义组织红袜会在其提高意识的会议上分发时事通讯和工作文件——她们称之为“油印的雷电”，而《妇女家庭杂志》则定期发布建议专栏——“这段婚姻还能挽救吗?”——男性编辑建议不快乐的女性如何成为更好的妻子，其中一些人陷入了虐待关系。(1970年3月18日，100多名女性在《妇女家庭杂志》的办公室静坐了11个小时，抗议该杂志的建议专栏、“剥削性”广告、该杂志的编辑团队全是男性，以及女性员工缺乏托儿服务。)通讯可以快速、廉价地制作，并且易于分发;相比之下，一本光鲜亮丽的杂志则需要基础设施、员工和大笔预算。更有经验的杂志编辑警告斯泰纳姆和她的合作者不要发表关于种族或女同性恋的文章，暗示这些“有争议的”话题会使杂志难以吸引广告商和报摊分销商，而这两者都是获得广泛受众所必需的。斯泰纳姆和她的共同创始编辑——包括波格里宾、玛格丽特·斯隆-亨特和玛丽·托姆等人——决定继续前进。1971年12月20日，《纽约》杂志刊登了一篇40页的插页文章。它的封面形象是一个多手的蓝色普通女人——视觉灵感来自印度女神卡莉——拿着熨斗、煎锅和其他家用物品。随后的文章《家庭主妇的真相时刻》详细描述了一系列令人愤怒的家庭事件(例如，一个男人踩在玩具上而不是把它们捡起来)，并帮助普及了女权主义术语“认可的点击”。1972年春，《女士》杂志出版了第一期独立杂志，其中包括约翰尼·蒂尔蒙(Johnnie Tillmon)的文章《福利是女性的问题》(Welfare Is a Woman’s issue);一篇关于女同性恋爱情的文章《女人能爱女人吗?》还有一封由53位知名堕胎妇女签署的公开信。(其中一些女性，包括诺拉·埃夫隆……
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tyr.2023.a908683
Emily Greenwood
How Homer Sounds NowEmily Wilson's new translation of the Iliad Emily Greenwood (bio) Every day, the news reminds us of our collective failure as knowers. From history and literature, we have learned over and over that war has a boomerang effect that destroys everything. Yet here we are again: in Ukraine, in Tigray, in Syria. As the scholar-poet-playwright-translator Anne Carson has written, extrapolating from the Iliad, "In war, things go wrong…YOU LOSE YOU WIN YOU WIN YOU LOSE." Carson weaves that pithy lesson into her 2019 play Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, an adaptation of Euripides' Helen. In ancient Greek literature, reflections on the inexorable reciprocity of warfare almost always lead back to the myth of the Trojan War and the Iliad, so there is a lot at stake [End Page 146] in the translation of this poem. As Emily Wilson puts it in a note on her new translation of the epic, "There is nothing like The Iliad." It has been eight years since the appearance of the last major verse translation of the Iliad in English (Caroline Alexander's, in 2015). But the landscape of Homer in English includes more than translations: since the turn of the twentieth century, stunning adaptations of the Iliad have shifted the horizons not only of what the poem can mean in English but also how it feels and sounds. These adaptations include the final installments of the poet Christopher Logue's 1962–2005 project War Music, Elizabeth Cook's prose poem Achilles (2001), David Malouf's novel Ransom (2009), Alice Oswald's poem Memorial (2011), Madeline Miller's novel The Song of Achilles (2011), Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare's play An Iliad (2013), and Michael Hughes's novel Country (2018). And the Trojan War has also been revisited in adaptations of Greek tragedies (such as Carson's reworking of Euripides' Helen). Like Wilson's widely acclaimed 2017 translation of the Odyssey, her Iliad is a Norton edition aimed in large part at the high school and college textbook market. Translating for this target group limits the textual freedom that a creative adaptation allows. But any translator aiming for their finished product to be a work of literature in its own right cannot afford to ignore these recent adaptations, which have given the Iliad such aliveness. Wilson, who is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, steers her craft by the fathoms of Homeric scholarship and the constellations of literatures in English, and the result—the fruit of six years of work—is impressive. Most important in a contemporary translation of Homer's Iliad is its ability to compel readers to read on, all the way through, line by line, attentively and with feeling. Many English Iliads fail this test. Some mangle Homer through "a mistaken ambition for exactness" (Donald Carne-Ross's withering criticism of Richmond Lattimore's Homer translations), losing readers' attention for whole sections of the poem. Others previously passed this test, but now the language is no
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tyr.2023.a908677
Heo Su-Gyeong
Timehill, and: A Long Time Ago Some King Died Heo Su-Gyeong (bio) Translated by Soje (bio) The following two poems first appeared in Time of Bronze, Time of Potatoes (2005), an antiwar poetry collection by South Korean writer, translator, and archaeologist Heo Su-gyeong. Heo was politicized in college by the pro-democratic protests against South Korea's violent, repressive military dictatorship throughout the 1980s. Her poetry, which reckons with the historical roots of that violence, earned her a reputation as one of the leading poets of her generation, alongside Kim Hyesoon and Choi Seungja. Heo moved to Germany in 1992, where she received a doctorate in Near Eastern Studies and resided until her death in 2018. At the time the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Heo was excavating the ruins of the city of Babylon. —soje [End Page 104] Timehill Six in the morning in August AD 2002 We cut the earth into squares with shovels Here come shards of earthenware and pig bones and goat bones and a dog made of mud and a wheel and finally a corner of a trampled floor from circa 2000 BC We pause the dig and begin cleaning How much of that floor is left, two meters by one meter? We measure its height and bearing and draw the remains on graph paper Two meters by one meter of circa 2000 BC Once we're done taking photos we dig again with shovels Let's go about thirty centimeters deeper Again shards of earthenware and pig bones and cow bones and mud dog and wheel and now even grains hardened like rocks A collapsed stone wall from circa 2100 BC The wall's twenty centimeters tall We go lower lower and dig another meter By sifting the dirt we salvage everything including the earthenware shards In only a meter I've dug up about five hundred years and I'm standing in 2500 BC While Abdullah steps away for breakfast I open a can of tuna If someone finds this tuna can about five hundred years from now how will they sort the order of this tangled time How will they decipher this timehill [End Page 105] A Long Time Ago Some King Died, Inside a house made of mud brick I drink tea, a golden tea brought by men who cross the border at night, a long time ago some king died, the men say, but where could that king's tomb be, we've been going around looking for that tomb for a very long time, the men say, once I find the tomb, once I find the golden tomb that shines like tea-light, once I find the dead king … why my wife disappeared back then, why my house was set on fire back then, why horses trampled on my children back then.… A long time ago some king died, he died long long before these men were born, but their eyes all glint with determination, once I find the tomb, I can find out where my family died.… The king died long long before the grandfathers of these men were born, why are the men trying to find the king's tomb, I drink tea, inside a house made of mud brick I drink tea, why did the king die long before the great-grandfathers of these men were even born? [End Page 10
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