{"title":"But What Would She Say?: Reframing “Domestic Terror” in the 1966 UT Austin Shooting","authors":"Jo Scott-Coe","doi":"10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.2.0294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.2.0294","url":null,"abstract":"On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman, a student and former Marine at the University of Texas at Austin, climbed to the top of the landmark campus bell tower and fired his rifle for ninety-six minutes. By the time he was himself shot and killed, he left more than forty people dead and wounded. But the night before he committed his public rampage, Whitman fatally stabbed his wife and mother in the privacy of their bedrooms. Had he “merely” killed either of these family members, we would not remember his name, and his acts would not be classified as terrorism. This article reconsiders canonical documents of the UT shooting in light of newly discovered personal letters composed by Whitman’s wife, Kathy. Close reading of personal texts can help illuminate the gendered nature of public spectacle and make room for understanding as well as recognizing not-always speakable sources of domestic terror.","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":"52 1","pages":"294 - 313"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44365051","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":"Ghosts in the Closet?: The Dandy, Specter, and Spectacle in Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Bougrelon and Monsieur de Phocas","authors":"C. J. Gomolka","doi":"10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.1.0088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.1.0088","url":null,"abstract":"While male same-sex desire was decriminalized in France after the 1789 Revolution, the specter of deviant sexuality haunted France throughout the nineteenth century. In the beginning of the century male same-sex desire seemed to only harass the shadows of parks, arcades, and dimly lit colonnades. The fin-de-siècle period, however, saw the exponential growth of a more public discourse on deviant sexuality. Directly related to this discourse and to deviant sexuality was the emergent social type found both in print and in the social sphere: the dandy. One of the rising stars of social and literary dandyism in the fin-de-siècle period was Jean Lorrain. This article will discuss the representation of the dandy as specter and spectacle in fin-de-siècle ideology through an analysis of Lorrain’s Monsieur de Bougrelon and Monsieur de Phocas.","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":"52 1","pages":"111 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47867448","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":"Her and the Hardwiring of Romanticism","authors":"K. Lundeen","doi":"10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.1.0054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.1.0054","url":null,"abstract":"The breathless pursuit of an unattainable ideal, a trademark of English Romantic poetry, resurfaces in the 2013 film Her, written and directed by Spike Jonze. The possibility of securing such an ideal is presented in the film when the main character meets the girl of his dreams—a computer operating system. The genius behind the high-tech companion is not simply its compatibility with its user. In a relationship between a human and an operating system, the medium is the object of desire, which, paradoxically, creates the tantalizing possibility of unmediated intimacy. Nearly two centuries earlier Percy Shelley pursued the ideal of unmediated intimacy in his visionary, erotic poem Epipsychidion through the two feminine lights in his life, thinly veiled as Mary Shelley, and Teresa Viviani, a young woman confined to a convent. The poem does not describe a conventional love triangle, however. In his reverie Shelley imagines a union between himself and Teresa (renamed “Emily” in the poem), facilitated by Mary. Though this article will comment on other Romantic texts in this essay, Epipsychidion will be it’s primary focus in considering whether the technology in Her enables a consummation of Romantic yearning.","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":"52 1","pages":"54 - 68"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46183615","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 Future of Melancholia: Freud, Fassbinder, and Anxiety after War","authors":"Heidi M. Schlipphacke","doi":"10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.1.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.1.0006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":"52 1","pages":"21 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42689705","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":"Re: “Laura Mullen’s Trilogy of Trash”","authors":"A. Robbins","doi":"10.5325/pacicoasphil.52.1.0127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/pacicoasphil.52.1.0127","url":null,"abstract":"This piece better reflects the content of a talk given by Joshua Clover at the 2016 Rethinking Poetics conference held at Columbia University and summarized in my article “Laura Mullen’s Trilogy of Trash,” published in the Pacific Coast Philology Special Issue “Hybrids and Other Fusions” (51.2, 2016).","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":"52 1","pages":"127 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42370002","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 Word as Poet and Poem in the Christian Gospels","authors":"Teddi Lynn Chichester","doi":"10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.1.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.1.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Celebrated by Sir Philip Sidney as the author of “divine” narrative art and “heavenly discourse” and deemed by William Blake the incarnation of “the Poetic Genius,” Jesus—not as familiar religious icon, but as a startling creative artist—fashions an expansive range of self-figurations that suggests a metaphysics and poetics of immanence and Becoming that both counters and coincides with the absolute Being of the Father as “I Am.” A liminal presence, in anthropologist Victor Turner’s sense, Jesus as Word provides responsive readers/listeners imaginative transit between ontological realms as they step into his vivid parables and pithy tropes. Both poet and text, Jesus invites us to read him as a kind of subject in process, a perpetually evolving poem that binds heaven and earth within powerful metaphors of identity and change. While the synoptic Gospels’ parables and similitudes highlight Jesus’ role as extraordinary poet, in his Johannine “I am” pronouncements and the theophany of the Son as visible voice that appears to John of Patmos, Jesus takes the form of a sacred poem, beckoning his audience(s), particularly (potential) disciples, toward their own creative, salvific rebirth.","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":"52 1","pages":"31 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46835346","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":"James Baldwin’s Another Country as an Abstract Machine","authors":"D. Odhiambo","doi":"10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.1.0069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.1.0069","url":null,"abstract":"This article on James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, examines how abstract machines diagram an unfolding flow of desires in a bipolar process of becoming that produces two distinct genres in Baldwin’s novel, a protest-literature narrative and an asubjective text. One abstract machine, described as a machinic assemblage by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, shapes the perceptions (cognition), significations (meaning), and language (representation) of a protest-literature narrative that takes place in Greenwich Village during the late 1950s. Embedded within this text is an abstract machine described by Deleuze and Guattari as a collective assemblage of enunciation. Its bipolar movement interrupts Baldwin’s novel by rupturing the stable surface with neurologically based emotions expressed by a chain of significations that enable it to become a new text, and in doing so, unbecome what it was. Consequently, this article examines how these abstract machines shape a novel that generates new meanings for the reader as a result of this encounter of discourses.","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":"52 1","pages":"69 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47259328","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":"Learning from Others: Reading Relations in Paule Marshall’s “From the Poets in the Kitchen”","authors":"K. Chandran","doi":"10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.1.0112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.52.1.0112","url":null,"abstract":"Paule Marshall’s essay “From the Poets in the Kitchen” (1983) is exemplary in tracing the progress of the word through the world of a writer sensitive to relations. To such relations all responsible reading commits us as social beings. Marshall’s self-reflexive narrative speaks to readers, especially young adults, to make themselves on terms entirely their own, and feel obligation-free amid discriminatory regimes and culturally biased institutions of learning. This article traces a carefully evolved pattern of reading relations in Marshall’s recall of locations, beginning especially with the kitchen where her mothers gather to tell tales to regale one another. We have much to learn from this discovery of her writing self in the most unexpected places; her chance to feel happy at happenstance; and above all, the creative evolution of one who turns out to be, again, a writer/teacher who learns from and reports on an unexpected classroom imbroglio. Responding quite earnestly to both storytelling and the epistemic bonds it builds for a raconteuse, Marshall’s essay attests to an enabling vision of community that is born of and sustained by communication, a community that realizes itself first of all in a classroom through the emblematic fiction and the figures of life it reads.","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":"52 1","pages":"112 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42019298","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 Against the Absent Referent: Bare Life, Gender, and The Cow","authors":"C. Grimmer","doi":"10.1353/PCP.2016.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PCP.2016.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Ariana Reines’s 2011 publication from Fence Books, The Cow, shocked readers with graphic depictions of brutal sexual and animal violence. The poems harness the violent language of the slaughterhouse to work through the violence enacted against women, while Reines incorporates her own, more lyrical voice. By juxtaposing institutional, instructional language with “new sentences” reminiscent of Gertrude Stein, The Cow brutally rips the poem free from glossy or romanticized perceptions of violence and selfhood. While Reines explicitly compares gendered violence to cows as “pieces of meat” in a commodity culture, this article asks how such a reading intersects with theories on “the” animal, ecofeminism, and bare life. The article examines poetry as a site for resisting hegemonic anthropocentrism. By focusing on language as the often-used rationale for the intersections of species and gender dualisms, this article asks after ways that language can illuminate moments for disrupting gendered and species violence. This includes approaching Reines’s book through the lens that problematizes bare life through feminist animal theorists, such as Greta Gaard and Carol J. Adams, and Anat Pick’s concept of “creaturely poetics.”","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":"51 1","pages":"66 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66525886","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":"Transatlantic Literature and Culture after 9/11: The Wrong Side of Paradise ed. by Kristine A. Miller (review)","authors":"J. Donica","doi":"10.1353/PCP.2016.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PCP.2016.0008","url":null,"abstract":"He would be disinclined to burn them; he could not publish them. Well, he should make up a book from them, I think; and then burn the body. I daresay there is a little book in them; if the scraps and scratchings were straightened out a little” (D3: 67). In focusing on precisely this diaristic attribute of “scraps and scratchings” as part of Woolf ’s growth, as “writing of a special sort” which is “a kind of intermediate stage between the unconscious and the public world” (9–10), Lounsberry—of course surpassing by far Woolf ’s humble expectations of her diary entries being “straightened out a little”—vividly shows us how Woolf became the Woolf we know today.","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":"51 1","pages":"110 - 112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66525966","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}