Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas最新文献

{"title":"Governmentality and Abuse in the Book of Esther","authors":"M. Ki","doi":"10.1353/pan.2023.a899739","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2023.a899739","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Five issues stand out in the Book of Esther: political feasting, inter-sex conflicts, intra-sex competition, genocidal threats, and the absence of God. Central to these problems is the basic tenet of Persian imperialism, for imperial governmentality is linked to the techniques of judicial, disciplinary, and panoptic power as well as the patriarchal power of (ab)using women to ensure the smooth functioning of family and empire. To rule a multiracial regime, the king’s policies can quickly change from racial assimilation to persecution and later strategic integration. From the point of view of the Jews, multiracial encounters often lead to the birth of hybrid identities, ambivalent mimicry, and racial anxiety or pride. Esther’s survival has much to do with her tactful negotiation with her abused state: she adopts a deracialized profile, becomes a beauty queen, and devises a drama-queen persona to save her people because Haman’s intercessory act is deemed by King Ahasuerus to be a case of sexual assault. The ending highlights three responses: the king accumulates more resources, the Jews celebrate their survival, and Esther positions herself as the queen of vigilance and self-governance. The post-traumatic ethos is not about a descent into cognitive chaos but the resolution to organize the grief-stricken collective memory and broker truthful relationships with neighbors, the self, and God.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"6 1","pages":"187 - 208"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82508074","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":"Ontologies of Alterity: Free Gift, Social Reproduction, and Affect in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King","authors":"Shu-Shan Lee","doi":"10.1353/pan.2023.a899747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2023.a899747","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King has been increasingly recognized as a critique of American neoliberalism, but whether Wallace suggests any specific way to challenge the status quo is still an open question. Focusing on the character Leonard Stecyk and his relationship with Wallace’s metafictional stand-in in the novel, this essay demonstrates how Wallace expresses an oppositional politics that takes on the ontological premise of neoliberalism. I argue that, against neoliberalism as an ontological project of immanent totality that configures capitalism as the nature of reality and the competitive homo economicus as human subjectivity, Stecyk represents three ontologies of alterity — the radical alterity of free work, the internal alterity of social reproduction, and the pre-individual alterity of affective resonance — that resist the totalization of capitalism, opening up the possibility of sociopolitical change.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"2 1","pages":"343 - 366"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87214253","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":"(Re)directing Literature to Justice: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”","authors":"Hawk Chang","doi":"10.1353/pan.2023.a899742","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2023.a899742","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” most inhabitants of the imaginary town fare well, but only on the condition that an unidentified child imprisoned in a dark room suffers: the well-being of most is founded on depriving the child of the inherent right to equality. Such an allegorical image of the suffering child embodies the hierarchical oppositions between adults and children, employers and employees, rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged. This paper analyzes the art of Le Guin’s story and its functioning as a testing ground for ethical theories.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"22 1","pages":"241 - 256"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73365702","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 Book of Esther: Notes for a Traditional Reading","authors":"Betty Rojtman","doi":"10.1353/pan.2023.a899740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2023.a899740","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The paper offers a comment, from the platform of traditional Jewish exegesis, on some of the issues that Magdalen Ki’s article deals with from a more presentist perspective. It highlights the subtlety of the rabbinical approach as well as its modernity and the complexity of the issues that it raises — social (the condition of women and of minorities), philosophical (the absence of God) and symbolic (intertextual reminiscences).In particular, it is difficult to understand the armed struggle with which this story ends without placing it back into its precise historical context. This episode, which tells of the first organized genocidal project directed against the Jewish people, will serve as a paradigm for the whole history of antisemitism.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"60 1","pages":"209 - 214"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77711568","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":"A Durkheimian Reading of Suicide in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Foscolo’s The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis","authors":"A. Castelli","doi":"10.1353/pan.2023.a899741","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2023.a899741","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Emile Durkheim was the first scholar to treat suicide as a sociological phenomenon, collective rather than private, thus illustrating the failure of modern individualism. This paper demonstrates that the tragic endings of Goethe’s Werther and Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis anticipate Durkheim’s suicide classification: Goethe and Foscolo created heroes whose tragic action accords with the basic elements belonging to Durkheim’s typologies.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"13 1","pages":"215 - 240"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81507133","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 Banality of Power in the Postcolony: Grifters, Tricksters, and Charlatans in Wole Soyinka’s Jero Plays","authors":"M. Ferrara","doi":"10.1353/pan.2023.a899743","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2023.a899743","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka wrote the Jero plays (The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero’s Metamorphosis) thirteen years apart, and they shed light on the distresses of a society in transition from colony to postcolony. Philosopher Achille Mbembe describes the postcolony as a site of high levels of corruption and appropriation of wealth by a ruling elite, a place where colonial rules linger and disrupt the workings of the state. Characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation defined by excess and a lack of proportion, in the postcolony, regimes of violence are prone to celebrating their own grandeur through macabre public events such as executions. Soyinka satirizes the protagonist of the Jero plays, a Machiavellian con artist who wraps himself in the cloak of Pentecostal Born-Again Christianity, for using blackmail and grift to secure a profitable spiritual monopoly on Bar Beach (to say prayers before and after each execution, to administer last rites, and to preach on the evils of crime). Through depictions of venality at every level of society, the Jero plays illustrate the difficulty of eradicating colonial legacies and demonstrate the deleterious effects of entrenched social and political corruption on daily life in the postcolony.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"81 1","pages":"257 - 277"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81906068","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 Bo/ald Woman in Auschwitz: From Abjection to Writing","authors":"Liliane Steiner","doi":"10.1353/pan.2023.a899745","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2023.a899745","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In their memoirs female Holocaust survivors recount the systematic misogynic attack of the female body in Auschwitz. The various literary figures that render, or rather testify to, a scene that is in every way repugnant to humanity in its violence, and the emphasis on the brutal physical aggression inflicted on women in Auschwitz underscore the resulting epistemological malaise.From the memoirs of Eva Edith Eger (The Choice), Livia Bitton-Jackson (I Have Lived a Thousand Years), Rena Kornreich Gellisen (Rena's Promise), and Erna Rubinstein (The Survivor in Us All), there emerges a collective portrait of the subversive Jewish woman who resists the heavy weight of the Nazi power. Through a close reading of female Holocaust survivors’ memoirs, this essay shows how the brutal assault on gender gave birth–against all odds – to a new Jewish woman who not only overcomes the shock of being despoiled of her basic cultural and gender assets but uses this deprivation to rise above her condition and eventually to write her own self through what Helene Cixous calls “a language of revolution.”","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"74 1","pages":"303 - 320"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77175497","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":"Modernism after Postcolonialism by Mara de Gennaro (review)","authors":"Lucky Issar","doi":"10.1353/pan.2023.a899749","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2023.a899749","url":null,"abstract":"Modernism after Postcolonialism discusses the notion of the Other, central to European metaphysics. Examining concepts such as classification, sovereignty, memory, and solidarity, the book engages with the complex negotiations that govern diverse or unequal relations. Questioning the repressive forms — strategies and practices — that are embedded in colonial narratives, the author aims to write a “translucent” narrative “so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous” (6). It brings out some of the aspects of colonialism that are often absent in post/colonial discourse. Chapter 1, “Troubling Classification,” shows that theories of difference, subalternity, hybridity, and relation are ultimately inadequate because they efface complexities that they cannot assimilate. The author examines Gertrude Stein’s novella-length story “Melanctha: Each One as She May” and J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, along with other texts, arguing that while both narratives engage with intimacy and community, they also show the limits of such engagement. Their narrative forms, though definitive and objective, are “saturated with colonialist logics of social and cultural classification” (26). Classification is problematic, not because it has no useful purpose, but because classifying others carries colonizing impulses. Melanctha, the central character in Stein’s story, suffers because other characters repeatedly and decisively read her, tell a coherent story about her, and this puts her at an acute disadvantage, “as her rebuffed affection and ongoing suicidal despair reveal” (47). The dichotomies and uneasy comparisons in Stein’s and Coetzee’s texts thwart the reproduction of sameness and otherness. Instead of submitting to the demands of what is constituted as “the pure and the proper” (60), Stein’s Melanctha and Coetzee’s Lucy embrace their anxiety, their vulnerable condition. The author draws on what she calls a poetics of “métissage” (27) or racial intermixing to represent racial tension in the two texts in a productive way because métissage steers the reader toward imagining a diversely constituted solidarity as it highlights connections rather than an otherness “normalized through languages of imperialism” (27): such a poetics is believed to build rather than bury or sustain anxieties about the Other. The quote from Aldous Huxley with which the subsequent chapter “Troubling Sovereignty” begins sets the tone of discussion surrounding the concept of sovereignty: “If the world presents itself to me as a unity as well as diversity, that is because I myself am one as well as many” (61). One experiences oneself as a unity but also as diversity at the body level. The idea of absolute sovereignty hinges on separating the latter from the former, and it is this violent separation, especially in colonial contexts, that makes “sovereignty” troubling. Citing Walcott, de Gennaro focuses on the transforming potential of unconventional forms: by developing s","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"63 1","pages":"371 - 374"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81376897","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 Painter and the Muse: On Archetypes, Complexes and the Anti-Jungian Quest for Mother in Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard","authors":"Ankit Raj, Nagendra Kumar","doi":"10.1353/pan.2023.a899744","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2023.a899744","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard is among the least researched of his works, the few critiques on it limited to explorations of the art and the artist in the novel. This article examines the main characters, mostly women, in Bluebeard, in a psychoanalytic framework based on the studies on archetypes and complexes by Carl Jung, Robert Moore, Douglas Gillette, and Joseph Campbell. The article uses these findings along with feminist critiques of Jung to assert that Bluebeard refutes Jung’s essentialist anima-animus model by its anti-sexist depiction of characters. By analyzing the male protagonist’s immature masculinity in Bluebeard and the feminine influence in his turning from an elitist impulsive man-child into an empathetic old artist, the article concludes that Bluebeard replaces the male-biased Jungian schema with a more balanced structure in the post-Jungian feminist vein, presenting a quest for mother, rare in the otherwise father-centric American fiction.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"23 1","pages":"279 - 302"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76625815","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":"Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday by Ksenia Chizhova (review)","authors":"Francisco Gómez Martos","doi":"10.1353/pan.2023.a899750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2023.a899750","url":null,"abstract":"ded in other things and systems. All existing sociocultural, political, and (post) colonial contexts attest to the centrality of interconnectedness even when the systems exclude and oppress. We undoubtedly need classification, boundaries, and solidarities to function as a society, but not in the ways in which these are carried out in colonial contexts through violence, erasure, and forgetting. One problem with the book, perhaps inherent in the nature of the questions it asks, is that it refers to texts and theoretical concepts either written by European authors or in European languages. For instance, chapter 3 discusses India, using Forster’s novel, as if India had no history prior to colonial rule. Indeed, the author attempts to underscore the limits but also the potentialities of the colonial encounter, but doing so obscures India and its history. Despite this challenge, which is typical of projects engaging with colonialism, Modernism after Postcolonialism develops tools to comprehend the current “unequal” systems, and though such efforts may be thwarted, given creativity and imagination, existing systems can be challenged and transformed, and anxieties replaced by harmony.","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"158 1","pages":"374 - 377"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80797699","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}