{"title":"Some Knights are Dark and Full of Terror: The Queer Monstrous Feminine, Masculinity, and Violence in the Martinverse","authors":"T. Evans","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2019.1679446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2019.1679446","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Violence is intimately connected with the body, and in particular with male embodied masculinity, in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-forthcoming) and its television adaptation Game of Thrones (2011–2019). While many scholars and media commentators have decried the series’ depictions of aggression, in this essay I focus on intersections of violence and male embodiment to reveal a more complex negotiation of normative masculinity than has been acknowledged in existing scholarship. A psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer reading of Martinverse constructions of monstrous masculine violence – by some of the series most abhorrent characters – Joffrey Baratheon, Gregor Clegane, and Ramsay Bolton – indicate how it is critiqued by association with the monstrous feminine. This critique involves a circularity of horror wherein these monstrous men both enact abjection and are subjected to it, a process that reveals the inability of heteropatriarchal violence to produce anything but destruction. Specifically, I argue that the normative male body and phallic masculinity are foregrounded alongside the symbols of the monstrous feminine. These instances rupture the illusion that a stable and coherent masculine subjectivity can materialise through horrifying depictions of heteronormative masculinity.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2019.1679446","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43925265","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":"‘Cast a Cold Eye’: Life and Death in W. B. Yeats's Poetry","authors":"Hawk Chang","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2019.1638008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2019.1638008","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Acclaimed as one of the best poets of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats is often the focus of critical attention. The connections between Yeats's work and the Abbey Theatre, Irish nationalism, language arts, and his love affair with Maud Gonne have been widely explored. Many of Yeats's poems focus on death, a universal topic which engenders fear and enchantment simultaneously, so his attitude toward the inevitability of decrepitude merits further exploration. This paper discusses Yeats's early poems, such as ‘When You Are Old’ and ‘The Folly of Being Comforted’ as well as his later poems, such as ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ and ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul.’ These poems are analysed in a comparative study of Yeats's conception of life and death. Additionally, Derrida's deconstructive reading strategy and his creative interpretation of death expounded in The Gift of Death (1996) are included to trace the elusive nature of death in Yeats's poetry and illustrate its personal and cultural implications. It was found that whereas in his earlier poems the hierarchical opposition of life and death is strategically subverted to help resolve his unrequited love affair, Yeats deals with death with energy and confidence in his later poems.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2019.1638008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48954138","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":"Zadie Smith's White Teeth: The Interpellation of the Colonial Subject in Multicultural Britain","authors":"Sercan Hamza Bağlama","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2019.1638007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2019.1638007","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT White Teeth (2000) fictionalises the realities that immigrants experience and reveals how they find themselves caught in a chaotic, fragmented and alienated world and seek to actualise themselves through similar escape mechanisms. Through a close reading of the novel, this article, suggesting that a literary text subjectively mediates actual, imagined or reimagined histories in a given period and manifests specific historical contexts through an aesthetic individualisation of the socio-historical totality, attempts to theorise the concept of double alienation from a Marxist perspective and to justify its arguments in response to recent intellectual and political histories and theoretical interventions. In order to provide a different interpretation of the process of alienation and to discuss the twofold escape mechanisms of the colonial subject, this article will, in this context, mainly focus on Samad M. Iqbal and his two sons, Millat and Magid, and analyse how they internalise the socio-cultural and political orientations of white supremacy, run through a state of loss, atomisation, meaninglessness and powerlessness and struggle to escape from and nullify the negatives impacts of the process of double alienation in the colonial centre.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2019.1638007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46559118","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":"The Politics of the Novel Circa 1965: Reading Brooke-Rose with Ngugi wa Thiong’o","authors":"D. M. Chesney","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2019.1638005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2019.1638005","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article reviews mid-century debates about politics and art by Sartre and Adorno to tease out a coherent sense of the political dimension of the novel form. The novel is essentially mediated by art-autonomous concerns, but it nonetheless exists to serve an ethical or political function. Alain Robbe-Grillet is then reviewed as developing a (late) modernist, critical, political aesthetic. I then closely read several mid-60s novels linked within a capacious understanding of World Literature as the modern world-system. Out (1964) by Christine Brooke-Rose is juxtaposed with A Grain of Wheat (1967) by Ngugi wa Thiong’o to bring out key questions in the debate: the role of tradition and technique, the necessity of critical social knowledge, and the importance of the implied reader. While Adorno provides one of the most compelling accounts of modern art and the relation of aesthetics and politics, his contemporary interlocutors still have much to add to a critical understanding of the artwork, and finally Ngugi’s example remains a vital one for thinking about these issues.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2019.1638005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42006115","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":"Cutting the Umbilical Cord: Patriarchy and the Family Metaphor in Turgenev's Virgin Soil","authors":"Katya Jordan","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2019.1638010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2019.1638010","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In his final novel, Virgin Soil (1877), Turgenev takes up the theme of the particular kind of populism (Narodnichestvo) that swept across the European part of Russia in the 1860s and 70s. Critics on both ends of the political spectrum believed that Virgin Soil failed to truthfully depict the populist movement; however, the novel provides an important cultural commentary that heretofore has been overlooked. Turgenev explores the theme of fractured father-son relationships and masterfully exposes the nature of political dissent in Russia. He conceptualises Russian radical intelligentsia as a natural son of an enlightened patriarch, thus questioning the long-standing tradition of viewing the Russian tsar as a father to his people. While drawing on the scholarship of Stephen Lovell and other social historians who explore the problem of genealogical and generational self-identification, this study of Turgenev's work provides new legibilities of the family metaphor that lies at the core of Russian political discourse.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2019.1638010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48996487","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":"Neo-Orientalist Stereotyping in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses","authors":"R. Bhattacharya","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2019.1595478","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2019.1595478","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT An American novelist of Chinese origin, Amy Tan attempts to reconstitute the American experience for both the first and second generation Chinese immigrants in her fictional discourses. Curiously, she defiantly promotes the idea of a re-created identity through assimilation, even while she is aware of the inability of Asian Americans to discard their ethnicity and disappear into the American culture. Significantly, Tan’s fictional Asian American characters not only justify their ethnic affiliation but also assert the importance of variance within the American culture by challenging the status-quo of American identity. However, this assertion of the Asian American subjectivity within the multicultural context of America further reinforces the insurmountable cultural differences between the scientific Western ‘self’ and the exotic Eastern ‘other,’ leading to the production of hybrid or alchemised characters, rather than monolithic Americans. Focusing on her use of exotic and supernatural tropes in The Hundred Secret Senses, this paper probes how Tan astutely perpetuates occidental and oriental stereotyping in her fictions and thereby indulges in New Age Ethnicity or neo-Orientalism, as a part of her aspiration to belong to the white American intellectual circle.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2019.1595478","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41916323","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":"The Novel and Media: Three Essays","authors":"J. Frow, M. Hardie, K. Rich","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2019.1595493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2019.1595493","url":null,"abstract":"These three short papers were initially formulated as contributions to a roundtable discussion on The Novel and Media held at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center in May 2018. Their brief was to contribute to the recent project of methodological reflection set in train by a resurgence of formalist analysis in literary criticism by thinking about the intersection of the novel form, novel theory, and media studies; at the most general level our challenge was to reflect upon the relation between the medium and the form of the literary text, and beyond that about the relation between the print medium in which the novel originated and the other media which form its environment and on which it frequently reflects. We start, then, with a reading of one of the most influential recent attempts to rethink formalist analysis, Caroline Levine’s Forms; John Frow contrasts her project with Jonathan Grossman’s Kittlerian reading of The Pickwick Papers in terms of the relation between two media of communication (coaching and the postal service) and the two novelistic forms that ‘correspond’ to them, in order to open up some questions about the limits and the appropriate focus of an analysis of novelistic forms. Melissa Hardie then moves to a consideration of the novelistic medium at its most material, taking the ‘queer materiality’ of Alvin Lustig’s 1948 jacket design for Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as an index both of the ‘pulp’ presentation by which modernist texts acquired a wider readership and of the ‘queer ekphrasis’ of the novel itself. And Kelly Rich reads Zadie Smith’s NW as offering a robust account of the encounter between the novel as a narrative genre and various forms of digital media. In Alan Liu’s words, the novel is engaged in and works to illuminate the ‘thick, unpredictable zone of contact...where (mis)understandings of new media are negotiated along twisting, partial, and contradictory vectors’.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2019.1595493","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43498740","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":"Loss, Motherhood and the Queer ‘Happy Ending’","authors":"S. Nair","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2019.1595476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2019.1595476","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Throughout the twentieth century, and particularly prior to Stonewall, literature frequently represented same-sex desire in direct opposition to the forward-looking heterosexual romance narratives that ended with marriage and implied or literal procreation. When Patricia Highsmith published The Price of Salt, in 1952, its popularity with readers, and in particular queer readers, was attributed by the author herself to the probable happy ending of its same-sex romance narrative. This happy ending, however, is uncoupled from the idea of a ‘happily ever after’, because instead of romance gesturing towards the promise of children, it is the precursor for a (queer) mother's loss of her child. This paper will argue that the introduction of children into a narrative almost always means that same-sex desire will not be allowed to flourish, even in a text that interrogates heteronormative assumptions, like Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The Price of Salt is significant, then, not because it provides a happily ever after for a same-sex couple, but because it calls into question the very notion that a happy ending is a gesture to a happy future.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2019.1595476","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47272479","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":"On Classification and the Grotesque: Theorising Para-Genre in Early Modern Nonsense Verse and Montaigne’s Essais","authors":"Katrina L. Spadaro","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2019.1595480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2019.1595480","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT It is tempting to over-simplify the status of grotesque literatures in relation to genre. This paper moves beyond the binary of adherence and violation that often frames discussions of taxonomy, and instead suggests that the grotesque is vital in the construction of generic categories. Using two examples of early modern grotesque literature, seventeenth-century nonsense verse and Montaigne’s Essais, this paper clarifies the relationship between genre and grotesque texts through examining three principles that underlie the grotesque: relationality, framing and conflict. Finally, it advances a theory of grotesque ‘para-genre’ to suggest a fertile reciprocity between genre and grotesque texts. This paper concludes that the antagonism often ascribed to the two is misplaced, and that genre is in fact sustained and reified through acts of taxonomic violation.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2019.1595480","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41629943","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":"Tasmania’s Cupboard: Indigenous and Convict Australia in Carmel Bird’s Writing","authors":"Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2018.1546651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2018.1546651","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The writings of Carmel Bird (Patrick White Award 2016) are a suitable literary canvas from which to explore a central concern in the work of a white Australian woman writer of Celtic descent: the need to reconcile herself with two dark chapters of Australia’s history; namely, the convict past and Indigenous genocide. This paper investigates Bird’s controversial focus on Australia’s – particularly Tasmania’s – past dispossession from her debut novel in 1985 to her present-day production. The use of exile, abjection, secrecy and what Julia Kristeva calls ‘the semiotic chora’ – together with different tropes such as Derrida’s crypt, incest, unpleasant corporeity and the neocolonial ghost – allows Bird’s subaltern voices to emerge and break the ‘great Australian silence.’","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2018.1546651","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42533537","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}