Studies in the Literary Imagination最新文献

{"title":"\"They want us to be Creoles. . . . There is no in-between\": Creole Representations in Ernest J. Gaines's Catherine Carmier and Lyle Saxon's Children of Strangers","authors":"Matthew Teutsch","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2016.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2016.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Mary Agnes LeFabre, the Creole teacher at Samson Plantation in Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, \"comes from a long line of Creoles back there in New Orleans\" that eventually moved after the Civil War to the community called Creole Place (166). Gaines does not provide the specific location of Creole Place in the novel, but one can assume that the community that Gaines describes, one where the \"people ... did everything for themselves\" and did not let anyone, no matter how white, enter into the community, has a real-world antecedent (167). Quite possibly, that antecedent could be Frilot Cove, the community Vivian is from in Gaines's 1993 novel A Lesson Before Dying. Thadious M. Davis observes another possibility for Creole Place's real life inspiration, the Isle Brevelle Creole community on Cane River near Natchitoches, Louisiana (\"Headlands\" 7). While Gaines's Creole community may perchance be drawn from the Isle Brevelle community, we know for a fact that the Creoles that Lyle Saxon writes about in his novel Children of Strangers have their origins in the Creole population along Cane River. This essay explores Saxon's novel in relation to Gaines's first novel, Catherine Carmier. Gaines has not mentioned whether or not he ever read Saxon's text when working on his own, but that does not change the importance of reading the two novels in conjunction with one another. They appear less than thirty years apart, and both deal with a unique aspect of social structure in Louisiana, the separation of communities into four distinct categories: white, Cajun, Creole, and black. Davis argues that the presence of a Creole community--for our purposes referring to individuals of mixed Spanish, French, Native American, and African ancestry--where individuals of African and African-American descent were free during slavery and had the opportunity for social mobility, provided a possible exemplar for race relations in the United States during the nineteenth century; however, after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the gradual Americanization of the new territory, and specifically New Orleans, Louisiana's possible example faded into the darkness (Southscapes 186). Saxon's depiction of the Isle Brevelle Creole community borders on stereotypical and patronizing. While he tries to provide an accurate portrayal of the community and its inhabitants, he fails to humanize them fully. However, he does provide a much more sympathetic representation than he originally did in his short story \"Cane River,\" which appeared in 1926. In this story, Saxon depicts Susie stereotypically as \"a wild nigger girl\" and \"an untamed savage\" (225). As well, he places himself in the black community by inserting \"we\" into the narrative. In Children of Strangers, Saxon's representation of the community becomes more sympathetic and humanizing, but at points he does revert back to pervasive oppressive images, especially in his description of Henry Tyler talking with Paul","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129544457","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":"\"Whitemouth\": A Bakhtinian Reading of Narrative Voice in Ernest J. Gaines's Transitional Novel Of Love and Dust","authors":"D. Russo","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2016.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2016.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Ernest Gaines's narratives of the rural South in transition record African-American experience in the voices of its people, voices he became attuned to on the porches of the River Lake Plantation quarters in Louisiana where he lived and worked as a child. In a talk delivered in 1971, Gaines recalls listening to those voices: There were the people who used to come to our houses.... In summer they would sit out on the porch, the gallery--\"the garry,\" we called it--and they would talk for hours.... Sometimes they would sew on quilts and mattresses while they talked; other times they would shell peas and beans while they talked. Sometimes they would just sit there smoking pipes, chewing pompee, or drinking coffee while they talked. I, being the oldest child, was made to stay close by and serve them coffee or water or whatever else they needed. In winter, they moved from the porch and sat beside the fireplace and drank coffee--and sometimes a little homemade brew--while they talked. But regardless of what time of year it was, under whatever conditions, they would find something to talk about. I did not know then that twenty or twenty-five years later I would try to put some of their talk in a book. (\"Miss Jane\" 24-25) It was this talk that Gaines needed to connect with again when he returned to Louisiana in 1963 and \"tried listening--not only to what they had to say, but to the way they said it\" (\"Miss Jane\" 31). He returned annually \"not as an objective observer, but as someone who must come back in order to write about Louisiana. ... to be with the land ... to go into the fields ..., to listen to the language\" (\"This Louisiana Thing\" 39). Though Gaines situates his attempt to incorporate the voices of the quarters in his perhaps best-known work, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, his return to the language, which he experimented with using in short fiction, happens in a sustained way much before he writes Miss Jane's story. This return, in all its political significance, is reenacted in Gaines's transition from the distanced, third-person narrative voice dominated by standardized English of his first novel, Catherine Carmier, to the narrative voice embodying the tensions among racial groups of his second novel, Of Love and Dust. Gaines incarnates the narrative voice in Of Love and Dust in an African-American man, Jim Kelly, who accesses the language of the landowning whites, the Cajuns aspiring to the status of plantation owners, and African Americans inhabiting a Louisiana plantation. Jim tells the story of a rebellion against white authority initiated by Marcus Payne, a young African-American man recently jailed for killing another man in a bar fight. Marshall Hebert, the white landowner, has bonded Marcus out of jail but created another kind of prison by requiring Marcus to work off his bond in Hebert's fields for years. Marcus, however, challenges the system of control by daring to love the wife of the Cajun overseer, Sidney Bonbon. Marcus ","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129598135","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 Ivan Turgenev with Ernest J. Gaines: Analyzing Fathers and Sons and Catherine Carmier","authors":"Claire Manes","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2016.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2016.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Ernest J. Gaines has been incredibly generous in giving interviews over the years (see for instance Gaudet and Wooten, and Lowe). He has been equally forthright in acknowledging authors whose works have mentored him. Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Anton Chekov, and James Joyce are among the writers whom he has admired. Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, however, is the book that Gaines has called his bible. It is the book that he used daily when in 1963 he completed his first published novel, Catherine Carmier. Gaines's efforts to write his first novel began when as a homesick adolescent in California he attempted to capture the Louisiana he knew and loved. He focused on the place he knew and the fissures that existed in that small community that had been home. He wrote the story of a Creole girl (a mixed race young woman of black and French heritage) and the young black man who fell in love with her. He typed this first manuscript, \"The Little Stream,\" and submitted it to a New York publisher who returned it, rejected. Gaines burned the first effort, but never forgot the story and recalled it some fifteen years later when he wrote Catherine Carmier. Gaines notes that James Meredith's entrance into the University of Mississippi in 1962 \"change[d] my life forever\" (qtd. in Young xi). He decided at that time to return to Louisiana for an extended visit in January 1963. In an undated speech, Gaines explains, \"I told myself then that in order for me to ever write that book I would have to take the same chances in Louisiana that Jim Meredith was taking in Mississippi.... I do feel that the six months I spent in Louisiana definitely saved my writing and quite possibly my life\" (qtd. in Simpson 31). The two events were the impetus for his return to California and completion of Catherine Carmier. Gaines states in multiple interviews that he had given himself ten years to succeed at his craft. In 1962, still without a novel and discouraged with the condition of race relations in America, he had planned to leave for Mexico with friends. Financially unable to make the move, he returned to his home in Louisiana for a six month visit. There he absorbed his home once again: the moss draped oaks, the bayous and swamps, rivers and streams, the Louisiana food. He experienced the \"Louisiana thing that drives\" him while facing once again the racism prevalent in his home state (Simpson 30-31). He lived this Louisiana life while reflecting on the stalwart strength of James Meredith enduring the indignities hurled at him, a black man at a white university in the still-segregated south. Returning to California in the summer of 1963, he began work on the story he had started years before and never quite abandoned. With Turgenev's Fathers and Sons as his bible, Gaines completed his first novel six months later. Catherine Cannier was published in 1964. Although it was not a financial success, it did confirm for Gaines his vocation as a writer and led to ","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121439929","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 White Female as Effigy and the Black Female as Surrogate in Janet Schaw ’s Journal of a Lady of Quality and Jane Austen’S Mansfield Park","authors":"David Wallance","doi":"10.1353/sli.2014.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sli.2014.0009","url":null,"abstract":"During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, debates over the propriety of the institution of slavery in the British Empire were at the forefront of Great Britain’s politics. Numerous cases had been heard in the high courts addressing the status of black individuals—whether free or enslaved—upon British soil. As Deirdre Coleman notes, the “British public’s fascination with complexion can be seen as symptomatic of the period’s fascination with a new identity and status for Afro-Britons following Lord Mansfield’s decision in the Somerset case (1772)” (169). Despite the fact that the institution of slavery and its by-products of material wealth and goods pervaded virtually all British social strata in some form or fashion, abolitionist efforts, especially among women, were on the rise. White females throughout the empire were becoming ever more aware of their complicity in the perpetuation of this inhumane system. As a means of elucidating the way the reality of Caribbean slavery permeated all areas of British society, it proves useful to look at the ways Janet Schaw and Jane Austen, two white female authors of the period, represented—or failed to overtly represent—within their writing the institution of slavery and particularly its psychological and physical effects on white females. From 1774–1776, Schaw, a wealthy, middle-aged, white, Scottish woman, sailed from Scotland to the British West Indies and North Carolina to visit her brothers and their families who had relocated to the New World. During her travels, she penned letters to a female friend of like social standing in which she described her journey. These letters were published posthumously as Journal of A Lady of Quality from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years 1774–1776.1 Four decades after Schaw privately described her adventure, Austen published Mansfield Park, the plot of which centers around an English baronet, who owns property in Antigua, and his family in England. Employing Joseph Roach’s concept of the human effigy as presented in “Echoes in the Bone,” the second chapter of his book Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, where he posits that “In an economy of slave-","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127567400","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":"What These Ithakas Really Mean","authors":"M. Lippman","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0012","url":null,"abstract":"While Constantine Cavafy's \"Ithaka\" may be his most famous poem today, it was written relatively early in his poetic career and treats subject matter that Cavafy eventually abandoned. (1) True, much of Cavafy's work bridges temporal gaps between his own time and an earlier Hellenistic universe, but a fair bit of that subset and almost all of his work subsequent to \"Ithaka\" overlooks familiar classical subjects. In fact, Cavafy seems drawn to lesser-known periods in history throughout his work because they are less familiar. The Ptolemeys, the Seleucids, and the fictional voices of those who lived under such lesser-known rulers represent a post-Alexandrian world that provided Cavafy an inroad for his own unique vision of a Hellenism not entirely mainstream: a romantic Greece, a fringe Greece, a Greece in exile. (2) But this was not always the case. Cavafy did compose several poems early in his career on topics within the well-known classical canon and, for whatever reasons, decided to abandon such topics as his poetic voice matured. The later obsolete or esoteric classical themes serve Cavafy in two distinct ways, neither mutually exclusive of the other. Little-known subject matter alienates readers from the antiquity with which they feel comfortable and these choices allow the ancient setting to become secondary to Cavafy's own poetic vision. With unfamiliar ancient references, Cavafy can project freely onto what is now a historical blank slate, devoid of readers' preconceptions that may originate from a background steeped in the canonical literary tradition. (3) On the other hand, when Cavafy addresses a well-known Greek subject in his earlier poems, he anticipates the reader's recognition and their initial reaction. He does so as a skilled reader of the Homeric corpus, imagining at least one hypothetical audience member (by no means, the only possible audience member) able to engage with the poem as part of a deeper conversation between fellow intellectuals. As each poem progresses, Cavafy manipulates this readerly foreknowledge to provoke responses of alienation and uncertainty not unlike those evoked in his later poems. In the earlier poems, however, the audience's familiarity with the canon aids Cavafy in bringing about this reaction. Whenever he selects a well-known myth, he immediately creates a bond with the prospective reader over their common heritage and knowledge of the classical canon, thus lulling the reader into a false sense of recognition and comfort. Then Cavafy swiftly overturns expectations. A familiar reference suddenly becomes unfamiliar and strange, exiling the audience from their pre-existing ideas and thus encouraging them to see something they once thought they understood in a completely new light via Cavafy's poetic craft. In this respect Cavafy is almost Euripidean in his approach. Like the fifth century BCE tragic poet, Cavafy's retelling of traditional ancient myths is anything but canonical. (4) Within these early p","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122076443","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":"Waterways, Not Walls: Cavafy, the Cosmopolitan Poet of Blurred Boundaries","authors":"Louis A. Ruprecht","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0014","url":null,"abstract":"[The cosmopolitan perspective] prefers voluntary to prescribed affiliations, appreciates multiple identities, pushes for communities of wide scope, recognizes the constructed character of ethno-racial groups, and accepts the formation of new groups as a part of the normal life of a democratic society. --David Hollinger, Postethnic America 116 [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ... [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. As for the inscription, let it be artful ... Since so very many others more barbarian than we write in this way, then so shall we. And anyway, do not forget how at times sophists have come to us from Syria, and lyricists, and other pretentious poets. So we are hardly un-Greek, I dare say. --Constantine Cavafy, \"Philhellene\" 21-27 CAVAFY THE COSMOPOLITAN These remarks were initially inspired by UNESCO's appreciation for the unique place occupied by Constantine Cavafy in the world of modern European poetry, with the declaration of 2013 as the \"Year of Cavafy.\" Notice that I did not say modern Greek poetry; that is important. For one of the many things that makes Cavafy's poetic voice so distinctive is its cosmopolitan quality. I want to begin by reflecting on what that word might mean, both to a reading of Cavafy and to his contemporary readers, who are \"hardly un-Greek, I dare say.\" Cosmopolis, of course, is a Greek word and a Greek ideal. (1) Born of the remarkable expansion of the Hellenic world after Alexander of Macedon's conquests and of the political reorganization of the Mediterranean overseen by his surviving generals, the cosmopolitan ideal was intended to display how Hellenism might serve as a sort of \"umbrella culture\" over a multiethnic, multicultural, and polyglot society. Cavafy puts the point pithily in a poem he began in 1916 but did not publish until 1931, one devoted to this same post-Alexandrian cultural complex. The poem is entitled \"In the Year 200 B. C.\" ([??]TA 200 [pi]. X.): And from the marvelous Panhellenic expedition ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), We emerged: The newer, the greater, greek world ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). We the Alexandrians, the Antiochians, the Seleucids, and the countless other Greeks of Egypt and of Syria, and those in Media, and Persia, and all the rest: with our wide-ranging leadership, and our flexible policies of integration, and the Greek Language we have in common ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) which we brought as far as Bactria, and to the Indians. (2) (18, 22-31) As a \"citizen of the world,\" the cosmopolitan was not tied to any specific place, or tribe, or god. Quite the opposite, in fact. This Hellenic ideal was believed to be exportable, something one could carry along as one resettled elsewhere in the vibrant world defined by the Mediterranean and Black Sea diasporas: \"Alexander had founded cities as others throw coins\" (Fermor 35). It is telling to notice that in this poem Cavafy did not capitalize the word Greek in his reference to \"the greek world,\" but rather d","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129996202","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":"Cavafy the Byzantinist: The Poetics of Materiality","authors":"A. McClanan","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0013","url":null,"abstract":"For me, the Byzantine period is like a closet with many drawers. If I want something, I know where to find it, into which drawer to look. --Constantine Cavafy (qtd. in Sareyannis and Haas 113) Constantine Cavafy's poetry renders an \"illustrious\" Byzantine past as a new world, one both alien and familiar to us at the same time. (1) These poems that are tied to the places and people of the Byzantine world are made vivid and tangible through a remarkable set of poetic figurations. His Byzantium is a place brought to life through an exquisite materiality, and key poems such as \"In the Church,\" \"Waiting for the Barbarians,\" and \"After the Swim\" testify to the importance of this realm in his verse. (2) These poems, which span through his years as a mature artist, therefore serve as touchstones for thinking about how he anchors his poetic universe of Byzantium in the fabric of sensory perception. Materiality in Cavafy's work has received its most extensive exploration in Karen Emmerich's recent doctoral dissertation, which pursues the path of the materiality of the physical manuscript tradition, taking as its inspiration the \"visual turn\" in literary scholarship (256). (3) Emmerich's work demonstrates Cavafy's awareness of the importance of the physical traces of his work as a writer, corroborating what we will see emerge in the texts: an extraordinary sensitivity to the experience of the Byzantine places and objects he evokes. Cavafy's Byzantine poems conjure up a palpable reality as the essence of their exploration of that overlooked period (Mahaira-Odoni 16). The overt appeal to the senses in Byzantine liturgy and visual culture grounds his depiction. Through a close reading of these poems, we can interpret these themes that shape his depiction of a Hellenic past in general and the Byzantine Empire in particular. \"In the Church\" inscribes that layering of the past, namely the medieval Byzantine world, onto the experience of the present. It is such poems that have led to the recent characterization that \"his faith was a matter less of belief than of pious observance\" (Raphael 4). The opening exclamation shifts to an enumeration of the church fittings, rendered in Daniel Mendelsohn's translation as, I love the church--its labara, the silver of its vessels, its candelabra, the lights, its icons, its lectern. (1-3) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] The discrete objects--not the building or the people of the church--absorb the watchful attention of the poem's speaker. This opening list lingers over the shimmering things; the enticing gleam of the metal defines the vessels (see Fig. 1). This quick inventory manages to capture a sense of initial observation, the unfolding perceptions on first stepping into the church. The suggestion that the shimmering quality of these things stands for the church might seem perversely superficial, but, on the contrary, Cavafy builds his Byzantine world from this transcendent materiality. His conjuration of the light-infused space of the ","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131470805","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":"Arthur W. Pinero and Cavafy the Dramatist: The Parallel Quest for the Quality Play","authors":"G. Steen","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0015","url":null,"abstract":"INTRODUCTION: CAVAFY THE DRAMATIST, IN SEARCH OF THE WELL-MADE POEM [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] --Constantine Cavafy, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 1882-1932 6-7 Alcestis and Clytemnestra tell the story of our life, eventful or empty. --Constantine Cavafy, \"Ancient Tragedy\" 1897, repudiated poem; translation mine (1) It is not a new idea to read Constantine Cavafy's poems from the perspective of theater, performance, stage directing, and role-playing, but these productive connections may gain new meaning and relevance from a detailed analysis of Cavafy's fascination with Arthur W. Pinero. The prolific Pinero was a London-born playwright, actor, and stage director and a slightly earlier contemporary of Cavafy. Pinero was of Portuguese and Sephardic Jewish descent. Despite his initial status as an outsider, he managed to integrate himself fully into lhe London theater world, but only with unrelenting dedication to his profession and with a life-long awareness of audience expectations and of social control in general. Pinero gained tremendous popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and was knighted in 1909 (Griffin 129). Even though most of his plays are now long forgotten, many were among the holdings of Cavafy's personal library. (2) George P. Savidis expresses an interest in Cavafy's theatrical perspective and speaks of the poet's \"semi-dramatic technique\" (\"Cavafy\" 369). His ideas, however, did not morph into a systematic publication, except perhaps for his 1985 essay \"Cavafy versus Aeschylus,\" in which the above characterization occurs: this older essay treats but also diminishes Cavafy's reception of classical Greek tragedy. Emphasizing Aeschylus (but referring also to Menander's New Comedy), Savidis qualifies Cavafy's creative competition with Aeschylus, hence the \"versus\" of his essay's title (361, 362, 363, 373). A creative competition of Cavafy versus Pinero may not be too farfetched. A few more succinct mentions of Cavafy and the theater appear in Savidis's Mikra Kavaphika A and B and in his commentary on Cavafy's unfinished poem \"Tigranocerta\" of 1929 (\"Tigranocerta'\"). (3) Other scholars and translators note the theatricality and the mise-en-scene potential of many poems of Cavafy, who himself was an avid theater-goer. (4) Even though Cavafy's life was closely linked to theater and stage practitioners, according to theater aficionado Kostas Nitsos, the poet believed that he himself would never be able to write drama. (5) Paradoxically, Cavafy then went on to infuse his poems with a profound sense of the stage, rendering him writer, actor, director, set designer, and prompter all at once (Nitsos 29). Moreover, Cavafy's feeling for action and gesture, his calibrating of plot twists and reversals, and his elliptic, laconic treatment of some subjects are, once again, truly theatrical. So, too, are the poet's imaginative use of direct speech and collective monologues (imitating choral speech), his penchant for ","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"111 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129784834","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":"Other Countries, Other Shores","authors":"Orhan Pamuk","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0016","url":null,"abstract":"We love poets for the things their poems lead us to imagine; but equally, we love them for how we imagine their lives to be. Confusing poets' lives with their work is an illusion as old as the tradition of confusing words with objects. But in fact it is for the sake of this illusion that we feel such a strong need for poetry, for novels, for literature. There are some poets whose work we read with their lives in mind, and what we know of those lives ensures that their poetry leaves a more enduring impression. C. P. Cavafy is, for me, just such a poet. Like Edgar Allan Poe, like Franz Kafka, Cavafy makes no explicit reference to himself in his best and most stirring work; and yet, with every poem we read, we cannot help thinking of him. I think of him as an old man wandering the familiar streets of an aging city. I think of him as a lover of books living as a member of a minority within a minority. I think of him as a lonely, provincial man who is fully aware of his provinciality, and who turns that knowledge into a kind of wisdom. Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, to a Greek family of wealthy drapers and cloth merchants. (The word kavaf, now forgotten even by Turks themselves, is Ottoman Turkish for a maker of cheap shoes.) The Cavafys were originally from Istanbul's Fener neighborhood, where the city's rich and politically influential Greek families lived. Later, they moved to Samatya, a fishermen's neighborhood, and then immigrated to Alexandria, where they lived as members of the Orthodox Christian minority among the Muslim majority. At first, their business activities in Alexandria proved successful, and they lived in a large mansion staffed with English nannies, cooks and servants. In the 1870s, after the death of Cavafy's father, they moved to England, but then returned to Alexandria following the collapse of the family business. After the Arab nationalist uprisings of 1882, they left Alexandria again, this time for Istanbul, and it was in this city, where he was to spend the next three years, that Cavafy wrote his first significant poems and felt the first stirrings of homoerotic desire. In 1885 the family, now impoverished, returned to Alexandria once more, to the very city he wanted to leave behind. The return: It is the saddest part. It is the source of the sorrow that permeates his unforgettable poem \"The City,\" which I have read again and again in Turkish and in English translation. There is no other city to go to: The city that makes us is the one within us. Reading Cavafy's \"The City\" has changed the way I look at my own Istanbul. For those who lead a provincial life, life and happiness are always to be found elsewhere, in another city, in another country. But for us provincials, this other place is perpetually out of reach. Cavafy's wisdom is in the dignity and introspective sensibility with which he approaches this sad truth. And finally, with the same linguistic restraint and philosophical simplicity, he concludes by","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"212 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114362437","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":"Why Is Cavafy so Popular?","authors":"Gregory Jusdanis","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2015.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2015.0017","url":null,"abstract":"If asked to identity a modern Greek poet, most readers around the world would probably name Constantine P. Cavafy. In their minds, he represents Greece and Greek literature. While this choice may be self-evident, it is nevertheless remarkable that a diasporic, modernist, homosexual poet should become Greece's poetic ambassador in place of national bards like Dionysios Solomos, Andreas Kalvos, Kostis Palamas, or Giorgos Seferis. Why is this so? Why is Cavafy so popular in world literature? Why are there so many translations of his work, at least in English? Why is his appeal so global? (1) There is no way I could consider all these questions satisfactorily. The position of a writer in world literature is a complex outcome of international and national literary tastes, the prestige of various national languages, the availability of translations, and implicit standards about writing and reading poetry. And while authors themselves may be aware of these standards and try to write according to them or against them, they have no way of controlling the fate of their work, especially after their deaths. We can see this with great clarity in Cavafy's case. He seemed very conscious of himself as an unrecognized genius, a person capable of writing about topics that others could not, someone who could foresee the future. But public recognition of his originality was gradual. Indeed, at the outset there was much hostility or misunderstanding of his work, especially outside of Alexandria. Although Cavafy's friend E. M. Forster was very optimistic about Cavafy's eventual place in world literature, saying that one day he would achieve a reputation in Europe; no one living in Alexandria at the time could have predicted his global fame today. To be sure, many critics were also claiming that he was a flash in the pan. Astute Greek critics, like Yiorgos Katsimbalis, the \"colossus\" in Henry's Miller's The Colossus of Marousi, could never imagine that Cavafy would overtake the then-reigning national poet, Palamas, to become an international literary icon (see Katsimbalis). Cavafy wrote against the literary tastes of his time and seemed to be composing verses for the future. (2) The Greek poet Myrtiotissa said so when she visited him in the early 1920s, describing his eyes as coming \"from a far distant time and revealing a mystery unknown to us\" (84). She depicted Cavafy as an exotic being who lived in another epoch but who understood our time and placed his stamp upon it. But many contemporaneous critics and writers, especially in Greece, could neither understand nor accept this imprint. The form and content of his verses seemed completely unpoetic, strange, and out of place to them. First of all, he lived in Alexandria rather than Athens, which was then becoming the center of Hellenic culture. Moreover, instead of composing in demotic, he chose a mixture between the vernacular and the archaistic language known as Katharevousa. While contemporary audiences favored flo","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126557515","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}