Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8536187
Daniel A. Newman
{"title":"Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism by Caroline Hovanec (review)","authors":"Daniel A. Newman","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8536187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8536187","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"54 1","pages":"265 - 272"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77991204","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 : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8536143
Philip Tsang
Abstract:This essay illustrates a "negative cosmopolitanism" in V. S. Naipaul's work. Both defenders and critics of cosmopolitanism readily identify the concept with the European philosophical tradition. Arguing that European thinkers do not have a patent on cosmopolitanism, I contend that the anomalies, dissonances, and ruptures that define colonial modernity can open up a "negative cosmopolitanism," which locates the potential for ethical engagement in what seems like the waste products of history. For Naipaul, cosmopolitanism designates not a volitional, character-strengthening endeavor but, rather, a painful process of self-negation. Traversing a world profoundly shaped by colonialism, the writer and his characters are at a loss to make sense of their historical lineage and their place in a rapidly changing landscape. Through a reading of The Loss of El Dorado (1969) and A Bend in the River (1979), I demonstrate that it is finally the failure of connection or solidarity that motivates Naipaul's attentiveness to the other.
{"title":"Negative Cosmopolitanism: The Case of V. S. Naipaul","authors":"Philip Tsang","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8536143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8536143","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay illustrates a \"negative cosmopolitanism\" in V. S. Naipaul's work. Both defenders and critics of cosmopolitanism readily identify the concept with the European philosophical tradition. Arguing that European thinkers do not have a patent on cosmopolitanism, I contend that the anomalies, dissonances, and ruptures that define colonial modernity can open up a \"negative cosmopolitanism,\" which locates the potential for ethical engagement in what seems like the waste products of history. For Naipaul, cosmopolitanism designates not a volitional, character-strengthening endeavor but, rather, a painful process of self-negation. Traversing a world profoundly shaped by colonialism, the writer and his characters are at a loss to make sense of their historical lineage and their place in a rapidly changing landscape. Through a reading of The Loss of El Dorado (1969) and A Bend in the River (1979), I demonstrate that it is finally the failure of connection or solidarity that motivates Naipaul's attentiveness to the other.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"68 1","pages":"163 - 184"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79362566","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 : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8536176
J. Engle
Abstract:Mostly dismissed as a trivial entertainment, Frederick Kohner's Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas (1957) is in fact a telling aesthetic and cultural document. University of Vienna PhD, Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, and successful Hollywood screenwriter Kohner empathetically fictionalized his teenage daughter's adventures with the original Malibu surf crew and in the process vividly signaled the emergence of a rebellious postwar youth culture. Just as interesting is the way Kohner's entertaining comic drama of feminist awakening plays out through an intriguingly complex narrative voice, one blurring distinctions between its California teen daughter-protagonistnarrator and the father-author, both learned European exile and savvy Tinseltown operator. In subtly decisive ways, Kohner intervenes allusively and intertextually in the central narrative to anchor buoyant personal history in larger philosophical and political questions, in a cosmopolitan resistance to American puritanical norms, and in knowing reflection on contemporary discussions of representation and image. Gidget is a surprisingly postmodern textual space of disruption and juxtaposition that compellingly addresses its stealth core subject, a postwar America with its Western philosophical baggage and political and historical burden fumbling awkwardly forward toward new social and gender models.
{"title":"Mademoiselle from Malibu: Eighteenth-Century Pastoral Romance, H-Bombs, and the Collaborative, Intertextual Gidget","authors":"J. Engle","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8536176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8536176","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Mostly dismissed as a trivial entertainment, Frederick Kohner's Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas (1957) is in fact a telling aesthetic and cultural document. University of Vienna PhD, Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, and successful Hollywood screenwriter Kohner empathetically fictionalized his teenage daughter's adventures with the original Malibu surf crew and in the process vividly signaled the emergence of a rebellious postwar youth culture. Just as interesting is the way Kohner's entertaining comic drama of feminist awakening plays out through an intriguingly complex narrative voice, one blurring distinctions between its California teen daughter-protagonistnarrator and the father-author, both learned European exile and savvy Tinseltown operator. In subtly decisive ways, Kohner intervenes allusively and intertextually in the central narrative to anchor buoyant personal history in larger philosophical and political questions, in a cosmopolitan resistance to American puritanical norms, and in knowing reflection on contemporary discussions of representation and image. Gidget is a surprisingly postmodern textual space of disruption and juxtaposition that compellingly addresses its stealth core subject, a postwar America with its Western philosophical baggage and political and historical burden fumbling awkwardly forward toward new social and gender models.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"45 1","pages":"233 - 264"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76857083","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 : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8536154
Sarah E. Cornish
Abstract:The World War II diary A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City (2005) documents one woman's story of survival in the spring of 1945 in Berlin, during which upward of 130,000 women were raped by soldiers of the Red Army. First, this essay introduces the politics of recuperating the English translation of the diary within the context of the scant supporting historical documentation and memorialization of Berliner women's experience during the occupation. Second, it demonstrates how the diary produces a feminist account of survival and a narrative for collective trauma by examining the diarist's representations of the effects of rape and rubblestrewn Berlin. Third, the essay details the complicated publication history of the diary through a consideration of the relationship between the trauma sustained by the survivors of mass rape and the blows to German national identity that it documents.
{"title":"\"A World of Tomorrow\": Trauma, Urbicide, and Documentation in A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City","authors":"Sarah E. Cornish","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8536154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8536154","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The World War II diary A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City (2005) documents one woman's story of survival in the spring of 1945 in Berlin, during which upward of 130,000 women were raped by soldiers of the Red Army. First, this essay introduces the politics of recuperating the English translation of the diary within the context of the scant supporting historical documentation and memorialization of Berliner women's experience during the occupation. Second, it demonstrates how the diary produces a feminist account of survival and a narrative for collective trauma by examining the diarist's representations of the effects of rape and rubblestrewn Berlin. Third, the essay details the complicated publication history of the diary through a consideration of the relationship between the trauma sustained by the survivors of mass rape and the blows to German national identity that it documents.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"98 1","pages":"185 - 206"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81144032","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 : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-8196685
William Davies
Abstract:This essay explores the depiction of the degenerating male form in Samuel Beckett's post-World War II trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) in the context of Vichy France's ideology of the body—specifically the male body—and the propaganda of the regime's Révolution nationale, which Beckett would have encountered in wartime France. Read with this historical situation in mind, this essay argues that Beckett's move from the limping Molloy to the bed-bound Malone and finally to the physically limbless figure of The Unnamable gives expression to a reality of physical deterioration that is unique to the degenerating body, a reality that also inverts the ideal of physical perfection that regimes such as Vichy produced. Analyzed in this way, Beckett's work can be seen to aggravate and challenge both Vichy's idolization of the strong, athletic male form and the ways in which Vichy and other midcentury ideologies produced narratives of the body steeped in a narrow and ultimately violent essentialism.
{"title":"Samuel Beckett's Trilogy and the Revolution of the Body in Vichy France","authors":"William Davies","doi":"10.1215/0041462X-8196685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-8196685","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explores the depiction of the degenerating male form in Samuel Beckett's post-World War II trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) in the context of Vichy France's ideology of the body—specifically the male body—and the propaganda of the regime's Révolution nationale, which Beckett would have encountered in wartime France. Read with this historical situation in mind, this essay argues that Beckett's move from the limping Molloy to the bed-bound Malone and finally to the physically limbless figure of The Unnamable gives expression to a reality of physical deterioration that is unique to the degenerating body, a reality that also inverts the ideal of physical perfection that regimes such as Vichy produced. Analyzed in this way, Beckett's work can be seen to aggravate and challenge both Vichy's idolization of the strong, athletic male form and the ways in which Vichy and other midcentury ideologies produced narratives of the body steeped in a narrow and ultimately violent essentialism.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"40 1","pages":"11 - 36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75695897","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 : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8196740
K. Powers
Abstract:Beginning with Red Dragon (1981), horror icon Hannibal Lecter thrilled audiences as the ultimate unreadable reader, consuming minds and bodies behind the polished veneer of aristocratic taste and psychological expertise. Yet by the end of the twentieth century, Lecter had shifted from monster to hero. This article argues that Thomas Harris's prequel novel, Hannibal Rising (2006), makes Lecter more palatable by portraying his serial murders as an act of vengeance against a postwar society that allowed war criminals to rejoin the consumer milieu. Hannibal Rising uses graphic depictions of the atrocities of the Second World War—including freezing, starvation, immolation, and enslavement—to mitigate Lecter's cannibalistic classism and restore his humanity. Lecter is rendered mute by the trauma of consuming his sister, the patrician Lecter Castle becomes a Soviet orphanage, and Lecter's eventual victims are war criminals who have reintegrated into society across the Western world. In return, Hannibal Rising's readers are asked to project the specter of Lecter's trauma and these war criminals' violence onto all of Lecter's victims. No act of cannibalism, Hannibal Rising suggests, is more monstrous than the war crimes and subsequent Allied apathy that Hannibal fights and bites against.
{"title":"Hannibal Lecter as Avenging War Orphan in Thomas Harris's Hannibal Rising","authors":"K. Powers","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8196740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8196740","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Beginning with Red Dragon (1981), horror icon Hannibal Lecter thrilled audiences as the ultimate unreadable reader, consuming minds and bodies behind the polished veneer of aristocratic taste and psychological expertise. Yet by the end of the twentieth century, Lecter had shifted from monster to hero. This article argues that Thomas Harris's prequel novel, Hannibal Rising (2006), makes Lecter more palatable by portraying his serial murders as an act of vengeance against a postwar society that allowed war criminals to rejoin the consumer milieu. Hannibal Rising uses graphic depictions of the atrocities of the Second World War—including freezing, starvation, immolation, and enslavement—to mitigate Lecter's cannibalistic classism and restore his humanity. Lecter is rendered mute by the trauma of consuming his sister, the patrician Lecter Castle becomes a Soviet orphanage, and Lecter's eventual victims are war criminals who have reintegrated into society across the Western world. In return, Hannibal Rising's readers are asked to project the specter of Lecter's trauma and these war criminals' violence onto all of Lecter's victims. No act of cannibalism, Hannibal Rising suggests, is more monstrous than the war crimes and subsequent Allied apathy that Hannibal fights and bites against.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"29 1","pages":"125 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80757889","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 : 2019-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-7995612
Florian Gargaillo
Abstract:Adrienne Rich's early poems have long been criticized for their apparent stylistic conservatism. Reconsidering Rich's first two volumes, this essay aims to offer a new understanding of their place in her poetic development as a whole. Far from traditional forms functioning for her as mere inhibitions, stylistic constraints provided Rich with patterns she could play with and against. In turn, formal rules allowed her to think critically about different social and political limits. This article hopes to encourage a more nuanced appreciation of Rich's formalist period, highlight its continuities with her later work, and complicate the terms though which understandings of her first poems have been oversimplified—deemed narrowly "conservative" as opposed to "radical."
{"title":"Knowing Limits: Adrienne Rich in Rhyme","authors":"Florian Gargaillo","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-7995612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-7995612","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Adrienne Rich's early poems have long been criticized for their apparent stylistic conservatism. Reconsidering Rich's first two volumes, this essay aims to offer a new understanding of their place in her poetic development as a whole. Far from traditional forms functioning for her as mere inhibitions, stylistic constraints provided Rich with patterns she could play with and against. In turn, formal rules allowed her to think critically about different social and political limits. This article hopes to encourage a more nuanced appreciation of Rich's formalist period, highlight its continuities with her later work, and complicate the terms though which understandings of her first poems have been oversimplified—deemed narrowly \"conservative\" as opposed to \"radical.\"","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"38 1","pages":"393 - 410"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81322784","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 : 2019-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-7995601
C. Ingram
Abstract:Facing a world of mutually impinging processes, of which climate and economic systems are only the most worrisome, critics in several disciplines suggest that human actors reimagine our inevitable implication in plural, shifting, evolving networks. Steve Mentz suggests a model of buoyancy, a self-imagination in which we maneuver as swimmers might in seas immeasurably larger than ourselves. William Connolly develops a notion of "vitality," understood as responsiveness to moments of transformation that exceed our conscious designs. Both suggest that dreams of mastery blind us to crosscurrents in enduring and evolving systems. Heather McHugh's poems invite us to read not for the solace of masterable meaning but for the chance and risk of aleatory encounter and its unpredictable elaboration. Even in elegy, traditionally poetry's moment of discursive mastery, her poems give full play to discontinuity and difference as the conditions of reading—not least the discontinuities in a historical and evolving language. Beyond elegy, McHugh's poems invite the reading of generative accidents, a practice that has analogues in reading a plural and uncertain world.
{"title":"Risky Business: Accidental Encounters in Heather McHugh's Poems","authors":"C. Ingram","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-7995601","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-7995601","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Facing a world of mutually impinging processes, of which climate and economic systems are only the most worrisome, critics in several disciplines suggest that human actors reimagine our inevitable implication in plural, shifting, evolving networks. Steve Mentz suggests a model of buoyancy, a self-imagination in which we maneuver as swimmers might in seas immeasurably larger than ourselves. William Connolly develops a notion of \"vitality,\" understood as responsiveness to moments of transformation that exceed our conscious designs. Both suggest that dreams of mastery blind us to crosscurrents in enduring and evolving systems. Heather McHugh's poems invite us to read not for the solace of masterable meaning but for the chance and risk of aleatory encounter and its unpredictable elaboration. Even in elegy, traditionally poetry's moment of discursive mastery, her poems give full play to discontinuity and difference as the conditions of reading—not least the discontinuities in a historical and evolving language. Beyond elegy, McHugh's poems invite the reading of generative accidents, a practice that has analogues in reading a plural and uncertain world.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"15 1","pages":"369 - 392"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90247623","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 : 2019-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-7995579
Dennis López
Abstract:There are ghosts in the barn, or at least Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus leads one to believe so. Instances of spectrality abound in the novel, suggesting a fundamental connection between Viramontes's figurative appeal to the "ghostly" and her more openly political and economic concerns in telling a story about the poverty, exploitation, and violence suffered yearly by farmworkers at the hands of US agribusiness. This essay argues that Viramontes's turn to spectrality in Under the Feet of Jesus aims to lay bare the fundamental fetishism and phantasmagoria surrounding the value form and the products of labor under capitalism—what Karl Marx suggestively calls "all the magic and necromancy" shrouding capital accumulation. Capitalism inescapably conjures its own phantoms and so remains haunted by the spectral figures of "dead labor" occulted under the sign of value. Accordingly, Under the Feet of Jesus depicts a California agricultural landscape haunted at every turn by disavowed "dead labor," both in Marx's figurative sense and in a tragically literal sense.
{"title":"Ghosts in the Barn: Dead Labor and Capital Accumulation in Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus","authors":"Dennis López","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-7995579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-7995579","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:There are ghosts in the barn, or at least Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus leads one to believe so. Instances of spectrality abound in the novel, suggesting a fundamental connection between Viramontes's figurative appeal to the \"ghostly\" and her more openly political and economic concerns in telling a story about the poverty, exploitation, and violence suffered yearly by farmworkers at the hands of US agribusiness. This essay argues that Viramontes's turn to spectrality in Under the Feet of Jesus aims to lay bare the fundamental fetishism and phantasmagoria surrounding the value form and the products of labor under capitalism—what Karl Marx suggestively calls \"all the magic and necromancy\" shrouding capital accumulation. Capitalism inescapably conjures its own phantoms and so remains haunted by the spectral figures of \"dead labor\" occulted under the sign of value. Accordingly, Under the Feet of Jesus depicts a California agricultural landscape haunted at every turn by disavowed \"dead labor,\" both in Marx's figurative sense and in a tragically literal sense.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"7 1","pages":"307 - 342"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77957544","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 : 2019-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-7995623
Christine Roulston
Abstract:This article explores the relations among childhood innocence, queerness, and nation-building in Rosemary Manning's boarding school narrative, The Chinese Garden (1962). Recent scholarship by Lee Edelman and Kathryn Bond Stockton has questioned the innocence we invest in the figure of the child, and how this innocence has become a precondition for generating heteronormative models of nation-building and imagined futures. Analyzing the boarding school community in The Chinese Garden, this article examines how the figure of the child is used to confirm the compulsory narrative of nation-building even as it queers the very concepts of place and belonging. In the narrative, set in 1928, the year of the publication of The Well of Loneliness, the protagonist witnesses an erotic relationship between two girls without wanting to acknowledge what is happening; it examines both the yearning for innocence and a desire for sexual knowledge within a context of repressive normalization and antihomosexual panic. The Chinese Garden is also a fictional autobiography, foregrounding Manning's own resistance to her pre-Stonewall historical present, and her fascination with the queer past.
摘要:本文探讨了罗斯玛丽·曼宁寄宿学校叙事小说《中国花园》(1962)中童年纯真、酷儿身份与国家建设之间的关系。李·埃德尔曼(Lee Edelman)和凯瑟琳·邦德·斯托克顿(Kathryn Bond Stockton)最近的研究对我们赋予儿童形象的纯真提出了质疑，以及这种纯真如何成为产生国家建设和想象未来的非正统模式的先决条件。本文分析了《中国花园》中的寄宿学校社区，探讨了儿童的形象如何被用来确认国家建设的强制性叙事，即使它质疑了地方和归属感的概念。故事发生在1928年，也就是《孤独之井》出版的那一年，主人公目睹了两个女孩之间的情爱关系，却不想承认发生了什么;它审视了在压制正常化和反同性恋恐慌的背景下对纯真的渴望和对性知识的渴望。《中国花园》也是一部虚构的自传，突出了曼宁对石墙事件之前的历史现状的抗拒，以及她对酷儿过去的迷恋。
{"title":"Queer Reflections on Childhood, Boarding School, and the Nation in Rosemary Manning's The Chinese Garden","authors":"Christine Roulston","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-7995623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-7995623","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the relations among childhood innocence, queerness, and nation-building in Rosemary Manning's boarding school narrative, The Chinese Garden (1962). Recent scholarship by Lee Edelman and Kathryn Bond Stockton has questioned the innocence we invest in the figure of the child, and how this innocence has become a precondition for generating heteronormative models of nation-building and imagined futures. Analyzing the boarding school community in The Chinese Garden, this article examines how the figure of the child is used to confirm the compulsory narrative of nation-building even as it queers the very concepts of place and belonging. In the narrative, set in 1928, the year of the publication of The Well of Loneliness, the protagonist witnesses an erotic relationship between two girls without wanting to acknowledge what is happening; it examines both the yearning for innocence and a desire for sexual knowledge within a context of repressive normalization and antihomosexual panic. The Chinese Garden is also a fictional autobiography, foregrounding Manning's own resistance to her pre-Stonewall historical present, and her fascination with the queer past.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"6 1","pages":"411 - 436"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84632679","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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