Recovering a Literary Legacy:The Life of Delores Phillips Delia Steverson (bio) In 2002, after suffering a heart attack, author Delores Phillips miraculously drove herself to a Cleveland hospital. Recovering from complications during her hospitalization, Delores later recalled to her only daughter, Shalana Harris, "Man, I should've died." But Shalana rebuffed, "No, there's a reason why you didn't die. You still have more life to live."1 Less than two years later, in 2004, Shalana's prophetic utterances appeared to be fulfilled when Phillips published The Darkest Child, the only novel she would publish in her lifetime. The story takes place in the fictional town of Pakersfield, Georgia, in 1958, and follows Rozelle Quinn—a resourceful yet cruel and manipulative mother—and her ten children as they attempt to reconcile generational trauma and escape racism and poverty in the Jim Crow south. The narrative is told through the lens of Tangy Mae, the titular "darkest" of all Rozelle's children, who believes that her education is the quickest pathway for fleeing her abusive household. The novel won the Black Caucus American Library Association First Novelist Award in 2005 and was short-listed for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award that same year. With the reception of The Darkest Child, Phillips appeared to have a promising literary future. But after a short and brutal battle with pancreatic cancer, Delores passed away in relative obscurity at the age of 63 in 2014. I was introduced to The Darkest Child in 2017 by a friend and colleague who knew I was researching representations of disability in African American literature. She suggested that the novel—with its attention to a variety of human experiences, including deafness (one of Rozelle's children is deaf and creates her own form of sign language) and madness (there is debate if Rozelle is "mad" or just downright evil)—might be a rich text to enhance my scholarly pursuits. When I read the novel, I found it incredibly poignant, funny, hopeful, and tragic, all at the same time, and I was driven to find out more about this mysterious author. Much to my dismay, other than a short biography [End Page 45] in the back of the book, a bare Wikipedia page, and Phillips's obituary, there seemed to be no substantial information about this formidable artist. Thus armed with Phillips's obituary, I reached out to Shalana on Facebook—and surprisingly, she messaged me back. After a few months of communication, I flew to Cleveland, Ohio, where Shalana and Phillips's sister Linda Miller reside, to discover more about this amazing writer whom I never had the opportunity to meet. Opening their homes and their lives to me through several interviews—over Linda's homemade desserts and Shalana's tuna sandwiches—they shared honest and transparent details about their sister/mother. Over the years, we would sift through boxes of what we would determine were pages of Phillips's unpublished writings, which had been tucked away in Lin
{"title":"Recovering a Literary Legacy: The Life of Delores Phillips","authors":"Delia Steverson","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911442","url":null,"abstract":"Recovering a Literary Legacy:The Life of Delores Phillips Delia Steverson (bio) In 2002, after suffering a heart attack, author Delores Phillips miraculously drove herself to a Cleveland hospital. Recovering from complications during her hospitalization, Delores later recalled to her only daughter, Shalana Harris, \"Man, I should've died.\" But Shalana rebuffed, \"No, there's a reason why you didn't die. You still have more life to live.\"1 Less than two years later, in 2004, Shalana's prophetic utterances appeared to be fulfilled when Phillips published The Darkest Child, the only novel she would publish in her lifetime. The story takes place in the fictional town of Pakersfield, Georgia, in 1958, and follows Rozelle Quinn—a resourceful yet cruel and manipulative mother—and her ten children as they attempt to reconcile generational trauma and escape racism and poverty in the Jim Crow south. The narrative is told through the lens of Tangy Mae, the titular \"darkest\" of all Rozelle's children, who believes that her education is the quickest pathway for fleeing her abusive household. The novel won the Black Caucus American Library Association First Novelist Award in 2005 and was short-listed for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award that same year. With the reception of The Darkest Child, Phillips appeared to have a promising literary future. But after a short and brutal battle with pancreatic cancer, Delores passed away in relative obscurity at the age of 63 in 2014. I was introduced to The Darkest Child in 2017 by a friend and colleague who knew I was researching representations of disability in African American literature. She suggested that the novel—with its attention to a variety of human experiences, including deafness (one of Rozelle's children is deaf and creates her own form of sign language) and madness (there is debate if Rozelle is \"mad\" or just downright evil)—might be a rich text to enhance my scholarly pursuits. When I read the novel, I found it incredibly poignant, funny, hopeful, and tragic, all at the same time, and I was driven to find out more about this mysterious author. Much to my dismay, other than a short biography [End Page 45] in the back of the book, a bare Wikipedia page, and Phillips's obituary, there seemed to be no substantial information about this formidable artist. Thus armed with Phillips's obituary, I reached out to Shalana on Facebook—and surprisingly, she messaged me back. After a few months of communication, I flew to Cleveland, Ohio, where Shalana and Phillips's sister Linda Miller reside, to discover more about this amazing writer whom I never had the opportunity to meet. Opening their homes and their lives to me through several interviews—over Linda's homemade desserts and Shalana's tuna sandwiches—they shared honest and transparent details about their sister/mother. Over the years, we would sift through boxes of what we would determine were pages of Phillips's unpublished writings, which had been tucked away in Lin","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract: Writing in the fall of 1830, in the period immediately following France's révolution de juillet , Thomas De Quincey predicts the imminent breakdown of social order in Britain. In his political writing for Blackwood's Magazine over the course of this period, he consistently frames the threat of French-style revolution in terms of the body politic and its vulnerability to contagion, often playing on the meaning of a country's "constitution." In 1831, upon the introduction of the Reform Bill, his worst fears appear to have been confirmed, and he now presents the upcoming revolution almost as a fait accompli. De Quincey's dire predictions fit into a larger framework of nineteenth-century alarmism surrounding contagion, "sympathy," and the collective action of the mob. This article examines the presence and influence of these concepts in De Quincey's political writing for Blackwood's over the period of 1830 to 1832, the year the Bill was successfully passed.
{"title":"Contagion and the Body Politic: De Quincey on the 1830 Revolution in France","authors":"Roxanne Covelo","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911452","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911452","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Writing in the fall of 1830, in the period immediately following France's révolution de juillet , Thomas De Quincey predicts the imminent breakdown of social order in Britain. In his political writing for Blackwood's Magazine over the course of this period, he consistently frames the threat of French-style revolution in terms of the body politic and its vulnerability to contagion, often playing on the meaning of a country's \"constitution.\" In 1831, upon the introduction of the Reform Bill, his worst fears appear to have been confirmed, and he now presents the upcoming revolution almost as a fait accompli. De Quincey's dire predictions fit into a larger framework of nineteenth-century alarmism surrounding contagion, \"sympathy,\" and the collective action of the mob. This article examines the presence and influence of these concepts in De Quincey's political writing for Blackwood's over the period of 1830 to 1832, the year the Bill was successfully passed.","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"491 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Foreword to Front Matter: <i>Recovery</i>.","authors":"Michael Blackie","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911438","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"41 1","pages":"5-7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140854038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Are We Ever Really Recovered?","authors":"Gianna Paniagua","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911443","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"41 1","pages":"51-60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140863141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A posthumanist understanding of the body does not view "illness" and "health" as properties of the individual body, but as emergent features of the relationships between bodies. As such, a relational view of health opens up avenues for the betterment of both human bodies and their social and physical environments. Drawing on posthumanism and the ethics of vulnerability, this article demonstrates how Brian Teare's The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (2015) provides a different way of thinking (and doing) illness, death, and vulnerability. With his acceptance and promotion of the body's dynamic materiality and chronic vulnerability, Teare advances a posthuman ethics based on our shared embodied condition.
后人文主义对身体的理解不是将 "疾病 "和 "健康 "视为个体身体的属性，而是身体之间关系的新特征。因此，健康的关系观为改善人类身体及其社会和物理环境开辟了道路。本文借鉴后人道主义和脆弱性伦理学，论证了布莱恩-蒂尔的《空形上天堂》（The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven，2015 年）如何为疾病、死亡和脆弱性提供了一种不同的思考（和实践）方式。蒂尔接受并提倡身体的动态物质性和长期脆弱性，在我们共同的身体条件基础上推进了一种后人类伦理学。
{"title":"Better Medicine: Shared Suffering and Chronic Vulnerability in Brian Teare's <i>The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven</i>.","authors":"Tana Jean Welch","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911448","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A posthumanist understanding of the body does not view \"illness\" and \"health\" as properties of the individual body, but as emergent features of the relationships between bodies. As such, a relational view of health opens up avenues for the betterment of both human bodies and their social and physical environments. Drawing on posthumanism and the ethics of vulnerability, this article demonstrates how Brian Teare's The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (2015) provides a different way of thinking (and doing) illness, death, and vulnerability. With his acceptance and promotion of the body's dynamic materiality and chronic vulnerability, Teare advances a posthuman ethics based on our shared embodied condition.</p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"41 1","pages":"145-166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140871517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is Burnout the New Nostalgia?","authors":"Kim Adams","doi":"10.1353/lm.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"40 1","pages":"167 - 171"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48158448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"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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