Studies in the Literary Imagination最新文献

{"title":"Kristeva, Intertextuality, and Re-imagining “The Mad Woman in the Attic”","authors":"Kristy Butler","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0000","url":null,"abstract":"How can one discover truth I thought and that thought led me nowhere. No one would tell me the truth. --Mr. Rochester in Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea 62 Truths must be told. As an object of discovery, truth is often linked to language. However, as the presumed Mr. Rochester figure in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea states, the truth is elusive and can often lead to dead ends and few guideposts. Similarly meaning as a related object of discovery also engages with language. As Jacques Lacan outlines in Ecrits, the arch of meaning between the signifier and the signified is a fluid and potentially infinite arch of analysis. When meaning cannot be fixed to a single signifier, confusion abounds. However, at what Lacan terms the point de caption, or the \"bow tie,\" meaning is fixed so that articulation and analysis are made possible in language (681-82). Thus, as a semiotic system, language engages with structures. Importantly, these structures can also become unstable. One theorist at the epicenter of linguistic and semiotic criticism and its effects upon social theory is Julia Kristeva. Traversing through the levels of language, her theories provide critics and scholars alike with several points de caption by which language can be explored and analyzed. This essay will discuss her analysis of language as a structure of social codes that create false ending points. Specifically, this essay traces the development of her theories of the ideologeme and intertextuality as a way to approach knowledge and perspective from multiple utterances. In so doing, textual readings, particularly of narrative, multiply from different viewpoints. As Kristeva asserts, the intertextual is not simply stories building upon other stories. Intertextuality is a process, a fluid state of oscillating interpretations that seeks to expose the plurality of meaning, both in texts and, indeed, at the most basic level of the signifier. The value of intertextual readings or re-readings of stories lies in their ability to open up a text to new perspectives while at the same time avoiding hierarchical categorizations. Interrogating the structure of truth as an object of language allows the polyphonic to replace the logocentric. Therefore, the last section of this essay examines how intertextual readings can be used as tools to explore and to define female identity in narrative from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Specifically, it explores the intertextual relationship between Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and questions the role that literary criticism has played in amplifying Jane's voice and silencing Bertha's. It is only through intertextuality that both voices are harmonized, expanding and deepening the reading of both texts. Moreover, Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology will guide this narrative analysis. Hauntological readings demonstrate that the literary ghosts of one text can haunt others. The hauntological traces of such ghosts mirror Kris","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"82 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127019419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reading Kristeva with Kristeva","authors":"H. Yeung","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0017","url":null,"abstract":"I even have the impression sometimes of returning to the same subjects, myself, like that \"revolution\" we discussed, but always modifying them and finding other angles. In considering fiction, the writing of novels, one might think that it is a totally different thing, but for me there are links, there are bridges; it is more a question of putting something into practice. --Julia Kristeva, Julia Kristeva 222 The works of Julia Kristeva weave a web whose threads take into account constructions and interrogations of psychoanalysis, politics, belief, belonging, language, poetics, art, and literature, all of which resonate with each other to create a quintessentially twenty-first century vision of what it means to be human in world culture, world politics, and world history. In a talk on the future of European culture given at the British Academy in 2010, Kristeva diagnoses a shift in the constructions of the subject, becoming representative of the \"kaleidoscopic individual\"; the affectively engaging enunciating first person pronoun is \"simultaneously itself and infinitely open to otherness: ego affectus est\" (\"Is There Such a Thing\"). It is impossible not to read her four novels within this ongoing construction, placing them alongside her theoretical works, and, indeed, looking at her theoretical works, in turn, alongside her novels; she cites the importance of \"a literary-philosophical coexistence\" to French culture (Plaisir 60). And, Kristeva has said in an interview with Margaret Waller (interestingly in the same breath as denying the possibility of her writing novels), \"if one identifies the novel with intertextuality, then every contemporary type of writing participates in it.... Intertextuality is perhaps the most global concept possible for signifying the modern experience of writing\" (Julia Kristeva 192). This emphasis on intertextuality continues in Kristeva's novels; she wants to invite us to read transgenerically, mixing, for instance, her work on Anna Comnena, which forms a major part of the novel Murder in Byzantium, with her Feminine Genius trilogy and her recent meditation on the life and work of St. Theresa DAvila in the context of the novel form: \"I would therefore like to invite you to read Anna Comnena in addition to Arendt, Klein, and Colette\"; \"[I am writing] a book, a mixture of a novel and an essay, about Theresa D'Avila\" (Hatred 6; Incredible Need 47). The driving force of this essay is intertextual, reaching across many different texts by one and many authors, building upon and resonating across subject-matter, style, genre, place, and time. As a starting point we will take the lesser-discussed fictions of Kristeva and read them alongside some of her other adventures in thought, discovering the possibilities of reading the revolutions, the links, and the bridges across her work as passages which lead back to the polyvalent artistic-analytical-critical personality of Kristeva herself. Woven into the structure of the novels we","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121189936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Paradise Lost: Reconciling the Semiotic and Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Love","authors":"Stephanie Li","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0004","url":null,"abstract":"In the foreword to the 2005 edition of Love, Toni Morrison recalls a playmate from her childhood, a girl with \"eyes full of distance\" who she later learns was sexually abused by her father despite the full knowledge of her mother (ix). Morrison describes how her memory of the girl's adult sadness evolved into an exploration of characters possessed by the \"clear sense of having no one on whom one can safely rely\" (xi). The three main female characters of Love, Heed, Christine, and Junior, are such women, women without \"fathering and mothering\" who consequently \"give themselves over to ... the man who looms even larger in their imagination than in their lives\" (xii). Morrison concludes by identifying what saved her from such damaging adulation of patriarchal norms: It was not just a feisty mother, a supportive father, and insatiable reading habits that kept me later on from giving myself over to a life of girlish submission--some form of smiling or frowning female resignation. It was the comfort of learning from those countering sources that there were weapons--other kinds of baseball bats: defiance, exit, knowledge; not solitude, but other people; not silence, but speech, (xii) As speech rescues Morrison, arming her with powers of resistance and joy, silence is what destroys the childhood love between Heed the Night Johnson and Christine Cosey. They embrace \"girlish submission\" as the only way to gain the affection and money of Bill Cosey, Christine's grandfather and Heed's husband. However, silence is not what first defines their deep, transgressive love for one another. Rather, silence reigns only after their friendship, a type of self-enclosed Eden, is destroyed by Cosey through his sexualization of both girls. By juxtaposing Heed and Christine's private \"idagay\" language against the patriarchal law of the father, the novel demonstrates how Julia Kristeva's notion of the semiotic--a state of undifferentiated plenitude based in the fusion of female bodies--is ruptured by violent entrance into the symbolic's oppressive hierarchy. Love undermines the Lacanian conflation between language and the law of the father by presenting idagay, a female-identified language developed by the two girls, as a discourse independent of the constraints of patriarchy. However, idagay must not be understood as a singular good or a simplistic escape from the alienating discourse of the symbolic. Though free of the divisive effects of patriarchy, idagay reflects the totalizing and ultimately isolating unity that characterizes the friendship between Heed and Christine. Their relationship fails to allow for individual subjectivity, that is, for the dynamic and generative possibilities of human difference. Morrison's exploration of how semiotic impulses can be mapped onto language demonstrates the need for a mode of communication that moves beyond the engrained dichotomies and antagonisms of gender associated with the symbolic's power to name and categorize. Such liberati","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"11 suppl_1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125654924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Abjected Landscapes: Crossing Psychogenic Borders in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve","authors":"Lizzy Welby","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0011","url":null,"abstract":"I had reached the desert, the abode of enforced sterility, the dehydrated sea of infertility, the post-menopausal part of the earth.... I am helplessly lost in the middle of the desert, without map or guide or compass. The landscape unfurls around me like an old fan that has lost all its painted silk and left only the bare, yellowed sticks of antique ivory.... I had reached journey's end as a man. --Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve 187 Through frustrations and prohibitions, this [maternal] authority shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper--clean and improper--dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted. It is a \"binary logic,\" a primal mapping of the body that I call semiotic. --Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror 72 Urban spaces, pastoral scenes, dehydrated desert landscapes. Presented in literary topoi, these geographical spaces have long lineages. (1) Literary landscapes lead the reader across unfamiliar territory, armed only with an authorial compass to mark hitherto unanchored cardinal points. We are, in effect, strangers travelling through imaginary geographical spaces. In Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, we become estranged from our three-dimensional reality and pulled into a world that is inhabited by foreignness. We become exiles in her imagined places where the borders of subjectivity become fluid, unstable, and, in a Freudian sense, decidedly unheimlich (uncanny). We are forced to cross the border where the foreigner resides. By \"confronting the foreigner,\" says Julia Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves, \"whom I reject and with whom at the same lime I identify, I lose my boundaries,\" no longer able to contain and explicate experiences within a structured phallogocentric discourse (187). Our \"psychotic latencies,\" which are held in check by the law and language of the father (le loi et le nom du pere), are thus reanimated when the borders of language and patriarchal authority are breached. Our subjectivity is never complete, always fluctuating between the symbolic and the irruptions into language of the semiotic. Literary language can, and frequently does, provoke a crisis of identity, and these moments of fluctuating subjectivity mirror our universal exile from the very heart of language and reanimates these latencies. Fear drives these crises in subjectivity and, more specifically, a primal fear of the loss of the maternal function. To become a functioning social subject who moves through the three-dimensional world in accordance with the law of the father, the subject must first separate from the mother figure and agree to follow in the father's linguistic footsteps toward socialization. To do this the child must not only abject the mother, but also perform a necessary matricide. To be able to name the mother, to \"find\" her again in the symbolic, the child must consent to lose ","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128488660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Writing History Intimately: The House of Jacob, the Quest for Home, and the Other Language","authors":"M. Margaroni","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0008","url":null,"abstract":"INTRODUCTION If one were to attempt an initial definition of the ontology of our age, one might do worse than to characterize it in terms of a war against inhabitancy. --Robert P. Marzec 314 The focus of this essay is Sylvie Courtine-Denamy's The House of Jacob which received the Alberto Benveniste Prize for Sephardi Literature in 2002. This is an autobiographical journey into the turbulent history of Sephardic Jewry from fourteenth-century Spain to the death camps. As Julia Kristeva suggests in her foreword to the book, what is at stake in Courtine-Denamy's herstory of an alternative Jewish tradition (a tradition that can be interpreted as critical to the one currently promoted in Israel) is \"an intimacy that reinvigorates\" (x). The force of this intimacy, according to Kristeva, lies not so much in the autobiographical sources of Courtine-Denamy's account but in her use of a language which (in contrast to \"Hebrew, the sacred language\") draws on sensory experience and \"the universe of kinship\" (xv, xiii). More importantly for my intervention here, this is the language of a landless people whose distinct fate and history exemplify what Robert Marzec has aptly called \"the war against inhabitancy\" (314). Inhabitancy, as Marzec defines it, refers to \"an obligation between humankind and the land, between human subjects as born in and through a relation to an ecosystem\" (315). According to Marzec, what we are currently experiencing in the face of \"the 'abject' of dislocated inhabitants\" is the latest stage of the erasure of inhabitancy as a distinct form of human subjectivity (310). Marzec traces this erasure back to the enclosure movement in England and imperial territorializing politics, arguing that the \"specter\" of this systematic severing of the bonds between the human animal and its habitat still \"haunts all neoimperial orders of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century world\" (314, 315). What I find valuable in Marzec's reclamation of the real of an interconnected land is that it opens up a space within which to rethink the human possibility of dwelling and dwelling-with against the \"blood-and-soil\" politics that has historically enframed this possibility and beyond the uncritical celebrations of \"a free-floating human subjectivity,\" a figure much cathected by certain forms of postmodern cosmopolitanism (Marzec 321). As I will go on to demonstrate, Courtine-Denamy's The House of Jacob makes an important contribution to the cultivation of a contagious, hospitable and guilt-free imaginary that does justice to the human need to connect through and across a shared (home)land. What is more, I will suggest, this imaginary functions as a form of resistance in the face of the distinct spatial pathologies that are part of the legacy of the war on inhabitancy: namely, territorial occupation, land dispossession, exile, displacement, migration, the nationalist politics of \"blood-and-soil,\" but also the systematic abjection of the national \"thing.\" ","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129188597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Monstrous Crossroads of Kristeva’s Textual Practice","authors":"Dawid Kołoszyc","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0001","url":null,"abstract":"\"I am a monster of the crossroads,\" declares Julia Kristeva on more than one occasion in her work, (1) referring not only to the complex intersections of her theoretical work, but also to her heterogeneous identity: a Bulgarian-born French linguist, literary theorist, psychoanalyst, cultural critic, and female intellectual determined to bring women's experience to structuralist and poststructuralist theories dominating the (mostly male) Parisian intellectual scene of the 1960s and 70s. Indeed, experience is the guiding post of Kristeva's thought, and her own experience as scholar, critic, and analyst has played a significant role in transforming the way we think about \"feminine\" writing, body, and desire. The aim of this paper is to explore Kristeva's contributions to the theory of the text, particularly in relation to textual practices of two contemporaries, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, both of whom have played an integral role in transforming critical responses to literary writing since the 1960s. I will attempt to indicate a few significant points of convergence in their work in order to make Kristeva's concerns resonate more fully within a broader intellectual conversation, and to emphasize what she considers to be the limits of cotemporary literary theory. To be sure, no simple assertion can be made concerning the exact relationship between the immensely complex writings of these three authors. On the one hand, their approaches to reading and writing run parallel to one another, often sharing common terminology: text, difference, alterity, or otherness. Indeed, their central organizing motifs--for instance, Blanchot's \"worklessness\" and \"the neuter,\" Derrida's \"differance\" and \"dissemination,\" or Kristeva's \"negativity\" and \"productivity\"--remain on very intimate terms with one another insofar as all three evoke that which is unthinkable, unknowable, or unspeakable, but without which no language or logic would be possible. On the other hand, each author's work develops a singular language that can never be entirely translated into another, even when it constantly affirms the necessity of precisely such translation. Their textual practices, to borrow Juliana de Nooy's formulation, mark \"the site of rupture-at-a-point-of-absolute-proximity\" (201). Generally speaking, Kristeva's textual practice may be regarded as an attempt to negotiate between Blanchot's exploration of reading/writing as a descent into the silent, bottomless abyss of the text, and Derrida's reading/writing as an endless movement across the textual surface through deferral, dissemination, iterability, and supplementarity. Kristeva accomplishes this by placing emphasis on three problems which, in her view, have been somewhat marginalized in the theory of the text: (1) the relationship between textual practice and the experience of the human body, particularly with respect to questions of suffering and desire; (2) textual practice as political-social engagement, whereby","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122463321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Moonlit Mirrors, Bloody Chambers, and Tender Wolves: Identity and Sexuality in Angela Carter’s “Wolf-Alice”","authors":"Kristine Jennings","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2014.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2014.0014","url":null,"abstract":"\"Who are you?\" said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied rather shyly, \"I--I hardly know, Sir, just at present--at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.\" --Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland FROM ONE IDENTITY TO ANOTHER In her well-known collection of \"stories about fairy stories,\" The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter revisits and revises traditional folklore; or, rather, she continues the tradition of revision inherent in this originally orally transmitted literary form. The shifting structures inherent to folklore, she claims, made it easier for her \"to deal with the shifting structures of reality and sexuality\" (\"Notes\" 25). Carter's appropriation of the fairy tale form is a conscious infiltration and disruption of western patriarchal ideologies and the binary modes of thinking traditionally embodied therein, an effort to question the \"nature\" of gendered reality and the extent to which our experiences of self are defined by \"the social fictions that regulate our lives\": \"I'm in the demythologizing business. I'm interested in myths--though I'm much more interested in folklore--just because they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree\" (25). Overtly, here, in her revisioning of folklore, and elsewhere, as in her analysis of the Marquis de Sade's novels in The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, Carter's agenda is one of dismantling the myths of human sexuality that amount to the oppression of all the sexes, but of women and the feminine in particular. \"Myth deals in false universals, to dull the pain of particular circumstances. In no area is this more true than in that of relations between the sexes,\" she claims (Sadeian Woman 5-6). In \"Women's Time,\" an essay contemporaneous with The Bloody Chamber, Julia Kristeva argues for a feminism that allows for plurality of identity and individual differences in notions of woman and rejects the dichotomy between masculine and feminine as metaphysical: \"the dichotomy between man and woman as an opposition of two rival entities is a problem for metaphysics. What does 'identity' and even 'sexual identity' mean in a theoretical and scientific space in which the notion of 'identity' itself is challenged?\" (368). The deconstruction of sexual identity is the \"authentically feminist\" practice engaged by both Carter and Kristeva, and both rely on the materialism of the body to do so (Moi 12). Fundamentally, Carter seems to be critiquing the mythology of western philosophy, beginning with that \"father of lies\" Plato and his subjugation of the body and the material world to the realm of ideal forms (\"Notes\" 27). Her writing undermines the basis of oppositional logic and the kind of mind/body divide propagated as a love of wisdom. Carter once said in an interview, \"I do think that the body comes first, not consciousness ... remember there's a materiality to symbols and","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123108639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Faulkner’s Jewel: Logos and the Word Made Flesh","authors":"Stephen Barnes","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2013.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2013.0013","url":null,"abstract":"INTRODUCTION: SEEKING A LIVING WORD From early in William Faulkner's career as a novelist, he wrote as a man troubled by the very medium of language itself. Even prior to the discovery of his apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County and the masterful stories that would, in rapid-fire succession, quickly follow, he was troubled by language's potential to remove human beings from the necessary dynamism of lived experience. Nevertheless, he also discerned the tremendous power of words to manifest all that marks the species as distinct. That is to say, humankind's dependence on words left it precariously balanced between, on one side, the disorder of sub-human existence and, on the other side, mere lifeless abstraction, cut off from all vitality. (1) In his second novel, Mosquitoes, a work that predates the imaginative return to what he called his \"postage stamp of native [Mississippi] soil,\" Faulkner explores the nature of language that is both perilous and hopeful (\"Art\"). The peril is illustrated when the narrator of Mosquitoes makes plain the temptation toward despair in words: \"Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words. It seemed endless, as though it might go on forever. Ideas, thoughts, became mere sounds to be bandied about until they were dead\" (153). The sentiment is one that Faulkner harbors and which would be crucial throughout his career as a writer--that is, as a man of words: in transferring experience into speech, words are prone to rob deeds of their vitality. Within the talky narrative of Mosquitoes, (2) however, Faulkner offers his own possible answer--one easily enough discerned, but hardly achieved--in the loquacious figure of Dawson Fairchild, a character who maintains a hope that \"words brought into a happy conjunction produce something that lives\" (173). The early novel, then, looks toward a new kind of writing that would seek to collapse word and deed, bringing into existence through language a new being that is vital and substantial. (3) Coinciding with this discovery of language's potential was a return to his native region, which he would later rename Yoknapatawpha County. In a brief and prolific period, from January 1929 to October 1930, Faulkner published his first three Yoknapatawpha stories, with the latter two, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, proving to be his first true masterpieces. Arguably, it is in these two novels that Faulkner's new conception of language moved to the fore, serving as a central theme in each work. That is to say, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying are, in many respects, novels about language and Faulkner's own struggle to produce works of art in line with his new conception of language. And weaving its way through the two stories is the metaphor of Jesus of Nazareth, who is presented in the Christian Bible--particularly the Johannine texts (4)--as the incarnate utterance of God, the divine logos, \"the Word\" that \"was made flesh, and dwelt among\" humankind (John 1","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124020590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jesus, Girard, and Twentieth-Century Fantasy for Young Adults","authors":"Melody Green","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2013.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2013.0011","url":null,"abstract":"In the first half of the twentieth century, fantasy stories for children and adolescents were often domestically oriented romps such as P. L. Travers's Mary Poppins (first published in 1934), or amusing but safe adventures such as L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (first published in 1900). In these early fantasies, the child protagonists were more or less safe under the watchful eyes of careful adults. After the Second World War, however, children's fantasy in the West underwent a decided shift in focus. The child protagonists could no longer rely on well-meaning adults, but had to confront danger themselves and resolve it. (1) These young protagonists faced battles, undertook quests, and struggled with concepts of heroism in a way that, while not completely new to the genre, had not been witnessed since the fantasies of George MacDonald in the Victorian era. (2) One particular motif that returned to the genre in full force after having been long absent was the idea of sacrificial death, or death that pays the price of something that cannot be bought in any other way. This motif first (re)appeared in the post-World War II fantasy by C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Many scholars have explored the religious significance of this text in relation to the author's own Christian belief, which distinguishes the use of this motif from those of earlier narratives in that its occurrence also marks the end of a sacrificial system due to the innocence of the scapegoat and victim. Undoubtedly, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a good example of post-war twentieth-century fantasy that proffers, through the motif, precisely such an ideological position as its theme, but it is not the only such work. During this period, fantasy stories with a comparable narrative trajectory, while not plentiful, were surprisingly popular, but were arguably eclipsed by the popularity of Lewis's work, at least within critical scholarship. Two such stories, which serve as substantial prototypical examples of the way the motif of sacrificial death is deployed according to this trend, are Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron and Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard. (3) Intriguingly, the sacrificial deaths in both these stories seem to follow a pattern that the philosopher, historian, and literary critic Rene Girard has discussed in his various studies, most completely in The Scapegoat. This pattern, which begins with what Girard calls the \"scapegoat function,\" has ostensibly shaped various ancient cultures and formed their mythological systems; its influence, moreover, remains felt up until the present day, if only in terms of how it continues to structure human relationships in an array of social situations. Since my reading of the scapegoat motif and the theme of sacrifice in these two fantasy writings for adolescent readers is heavily dependent on Girard's formulation, a quick explanation of his theory at this juncture is imperative. Accordin","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129437493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hidden Images of Christ in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis","authors":"P. Schakel","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2013.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2013.0010","url":null,"abstract":"C. S. Lewis \"was acutely conscious of the hiddenness of God, of the inexhaustible mystery of the Divine,\" according to Kallistos Ware, Bishop of Diokleia and the Spalding Lecturer in Orthodox Studies at Oxford University. It is an awareness Lewis held in common with the Orthodox tradition (\"God\" 56). Although Lewis's apologetic works, Ware continues, with their almost overconfident reliance on reason and moral law, are cataphatic in tenor, an apophatic side is evident in his imaginative writings. (1) Michael Ward argues that Ware's insight is applicable to Lewis's general theological vision, his continual emphasis on God's unperceived omnipresence and proximity: \"The major feature of his spirituality is the exercising of Enjoyment consciousness in order to experience that hidden divinity\" (Planet 227). This paper will build on those comments and show that a subtle mixture of hiddenness and revelation is characteristic of Lewis's imaging of Christ in his major fiction--the Space Trilogy, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Till We Have Faces. Such a \"hidden\" approach is apparent in Lewis's earliest work of fiction, Out of the Silent Planet, published in 1938. Hiding the Christian references was easier then than it was later in Lewis's career. Today Lewis is well known as one of the twentieth century's leading defenders of the Christian faith, and readers expect to find, and thus look for, Christian themes in his fiction. But that was not the case in 1938. At that point his name would have been recognized only by literary scholars. They knew it because of the recent publication of a brilliant study of the courtly love tradition, The Allegory of Love. That book, and a half-dozen scholarly articles, marked Lewis as a leading figure in the post-war generation of literary scholars. The only other things he had published at that point were three books with very low sales figures: a collection of war poems entitled Spirits in Bondage; a long narrative poem, Dymer (both published under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton--his own first name and his mother's maiden name); and a rather strange work entitled The Pilgrim's Regress, which is an allegorical account of his sojourns as an agnostic (he said atheist) in his teens and twenties, and his journey back to the Christian faith, which culminated in 1931. It is now evident from The Pilgrim's Regress that Lewis had begun using his writing skills in support of the faith to which he had returned, but readers then would not be aware of this. In Out of the Silent Planet, a middle-aged professor, Elwin Ransom, who reminds the reader of both Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, is kidnapped by a scientist and an adventurer (Edward Rolles Weston and Richard Devine), and taken with them on a space vehicle to Mars (though called by its \"Old Solar\" name, Malacandra, in the novel). The flight is a journey into experience and self-knowledge for Ransom as he learns, for example, that space is not cold, empty, and barren, but is pulsating with","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128092480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}