EXPLICATOR最新文献

{"title":"Body and perception reshaped by influenza pandemic in MRS DALLOWAY","authors":"Qianqian Xu, Baojie Li","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2243536","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2243536","url":null,"abstract":"In the first sentence of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf emphasizes the heroine Clarissa Dalloway said that “she would buy the flowers herself ” (1). Immediately, in the second paragraph consisting of three sentences, a detailed explanation is given that Lucy the maid is engaged otherwise and thereby is not available for the errand. However, closer examination reveals that the third-person narrative seemingly highlighting an objective description of Lucy’s unavailability is subtly questioned by the first-person focalization, and further reinforced by the stream-of-consciousness orientation of the narrative. In this sense, the decision to go to buy banquet flowers is more a willingness on the part of Clarissa Dalloway than a necessity out of Lucy’s unavailability, which is proved by the female protagonist’s hilarity in the follow-up exclamatory sentences: “what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge” (1). In consideration of the party as part of the routine for Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class lady in London, we find it necessary to explore more on her above-mentioned ecstasy of going out of the house, her expectation for the party, and the potential psychological mechanism behind it. Why is it exciting for her to see the hustle and bustle in the street? In fact, the continuity of the story shows this is not the only occasion when the heroine insists on doing such chores as buying flowers. When Lucy offers to help mend her dress, she enthusiastically expresses gratitude by using “thank you” at least six times and then firmly declines. What is the intrinsic motivation behind her persistence? Is her profound thankfulness addressed to Lucy only, or to something or somebody else at the same time? More specifically, is it related to Woolf ’s endeavor of creating novels “devoted to influenza” (On Being Ill 4)? Mrs. Dalloway, whose story took place in 1923, is one of the few exceptions to the 1918 influenza pandemic which killed fifty to a hundred million people globally but was “virtually absent from American and British literature of its era” (Jurecic 1). Exploring Woolf ’s personal experience, we find her life was punctured by several bouts of influenza including the 1918 https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2243536","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"46 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46232779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thoreau’s philosophy of work in frost’s “mowing”","authors":"Amy Gaden","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2252970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2252970","url":null,"abstract":"Eighteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel defined transcendental poetry as a “kind of poetry whose essence lies in the relationship between the ideal and real” (qtd in Dahlstrom 2013, 125). Though Schlegel lived before notable writers Thoreau and Frost, he was influenced by the same Kantian ideals that inspired the American transcendental movement. Henry David Thoreau lived an iconoclastic life of honest observations of both raw nature and “civilized” society, developing his philosophy regarding man’s relationship with the world, delicately balancing idealism in the context of his time. Among his publications is his perspective on work, expressed throughout Walden as well as specifically explicated in his lyceum lecture “Life Without Principle”presented in 1854 and published posthumously in 1863. This simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic viewpoint inspired many after him including the poet Robert Frost. In his poetry, Frost balances the “ideal and the real” called for by Schlegel, not simply glorifying what he sees but finding beauty in the ordinary, excitement in the mundane, meaning in the unremarkable. Specifically, Frost explores the deep meaning inherent in simple actions in his sonnet “Mowing”a poem that reflects the influence of Thoreau’s philosophy of work through its focus on solitude in nature, acceptance of reality, and satisfaction in labor. In the first lines of the poem, Frost describes a solitary farmer lost in thought, deeply engaged in his actions and aware of his surroundings like the ideal Thoreauvian poet. Interestingly, both Frost and Thoreau had farming experience; though the two men did not find financial success through farming, both had some of their best years consumed by this laborFrost during his influential years at Derry Farm and Thoreau when he lived at Walden Pond and “hoed beans” in near complete isolation (Thoreau 2012, 91). Likewise, the farmer in “Mowing” mows with “never a sound beside the wood but one” – his “long scythe whispering to the ground” (Frost 1-2). The solitary whisper https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2252970","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"73 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41540278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Queer Desires in “The Daemon Lover” and “Trial by Combat”","authors":"Kewei Chen","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2215919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2215919","url":null,"abstract":"Shirley Jackson’s 1949 collection The Lottery and Other Stories contains a kaleidoscope of tales—including the canonical titular piece—in which the quotidian banality is quixotically subverted to critique the precarity of heteronormativity. By exploring two stories among them—“The Daemon Lover” and “Trial by Combat”—this essay unveils the embryonic lesbian desires and repairs the overlooked queer lacunae lurking within the familiar. “The Daemon Lover” has a simple plot. The unnamed protagonist—a woman in her thirties—wakes up on the day of her wedding, and drinks coffee while expecting the return of her fiancé, James Harris. After a tedious wait, she roams the neighborhood dizzily and frantically trying to hunt down Harris. Her quest ends at an empty apartment, where eerie laughter can be heard from the inside and no one comes to answer the door. According to Judy Oppenheimer, Jackson in her notes written at Syracuse University alludes to “a shadowy figure that had begun to appear to her, either in a dream or in a vision ... a figure that would eventually take form in her mind as the demon lover” (48). This elusive figure vacillates between the tangible and the immaterial, “imbued with the ability to fill up an aching void, never directly seen, rarely even directly alluded to” (48–49). Jackson invents a peripatetic heroine traversing a defamiliarized neighborhood and tenaciously chasing after an insubstantial lover, while letting go of the necessity for any hetero-romantic closure. The story’s atmosphere is psychedelia for it is focalized through the protagonist’s excessively caffeinated mind. It is vaguely hinted that Harris is an illusion fabricated by the woman’s hallucination. When she arrives at Harris’ supposedly “right” address, she realizes that “she had never been here before ... and Jamie’s name was not on any of the mailboxes in the vestibule” (Jackson, “The Daemon Lover” 14). Paradoxically, certain locals claim to have somehow encountered him. Thus, Harris embodies a partial visibility with his intermittent emergences. This https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2215919","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"14 - 18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44363723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A third biblical foundation of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”","authors":"Isaac James Richards","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2214674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2214674","url":null,"abstract":"James Tackach, after noting the surprisingly few critical discussions of religious themes in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” argues that there are “two main biblical texts that form the foundation of Baldwin’s story: the Cain and Abel story from the Book of Genesis and the parable of the Prodigal Son from Luke’s gospel” (109). This brief essay offers a third biblical foundation to Baldwin’s story—the story of Joseph in Egypt—which illuminates the salvific and redemptive role that Sonny plays in the life of his brother and the lives of those who listen to his music. Joseph is Israel’s youngest son, and “Israel loved Joseph more than all his children” (Genesis 37:3). This favoritism has an adverse effect on Joseph’s eleven brothers, for “when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him” (Genesis 37:4). Joseph’s dreams and visions about his superiority over the brothers only increases their dislike for him. Out of anger, “they took him, and cast him into a pit” and then sold him as a slave (Genesis 37:24). In slavery, Joseph journeys from the depths of prison to being the second most powerful man in all of Egypt, saving not only Egypt but also his own household, finally uniting with his brothers and family. Sonny has striking similarities to Joseph of Egypt. Like Joseph was favored by his father, “Sonny was the apple of his father’s eye” (114). Sonny also has a callous relationship with his older brother, who admits, “we fought almost every time we met” (126). The brother is explicit about his dislike for Sonny when he says, “I didn’t like the way he carried himself, loose and dreamlike all the time” (126). Baldwin’s chosen adjective here—dreamlike—is a compelling piece of evidence for Sonny’s connection with Joseph, and it is a trope throughout the story. Sonny is described as one of the schoolboys who amidst “the darkness of their lives ... vindictively, dreamed” (104). When he plays the piano “it was as though he were all wrapped up in some cloud some fire, some vision all his own” (125, emphasis added). Like Joseph, Sonny is a dreamer. His dreamlike attitude and vision make him different, “weird and https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2214674","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"6 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46025430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Blood and Mud in Shelley’s “England in 1819.”","authors":"Francesca Cauchi","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2227373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2227373","url":null,"abstract":"Shelley’s sonnet “England in 1819” reads like a pathology report on a terminally ill patient. The patient in question is England in the year 1819. George III, the country’s erstwhile monarch, is “old, mad, blind” and moribund; the Prince Regent, a gluttonous libertine, attests to the progressive vitiation (“mud from a muddy spring”) of the royal gene pool; the vital organs of state are dysfunctional; the body politic is “fainting” from starvation; and the episode that has brought England’s endemic disease to light is the wryly dubbed Peterloo Massacre – the moment when liberty met its Waterloo. On 16th August, 1819, rural and royal cavalry units charged into St Peter’s Field, Manchester, where the charismatic radical orator Henry Hunt was addressing a vast (16–20,000 people) but peaceful public meeting. The fatal combination of Hunt on the hustings agitating for parliamentary reform and the saber-slashing, hoof-crushing cavalry down below left eighteen dead and almost 700 seriously wounded.1 What the Manchester massacre laid bare was the moral bankruptcy of a government that refused to acknowledge or allay the plight of the impoverished working classes in the industrial north of England. It is this dereliction of duty that Shelley catalogues in his sonnet and crystallizes through the poem’s pivotal blood conceit. The first intimation of blood is given in the second and third lines of the sonnet: “Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow/Through public scorn – mud from a muddy spring.” The word “dregs” is a clear reference to the debauched Prince Regent, epitomizing the dullness – a rich pun denoting a lack of sensibility, efficacy, and sharpness of https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2227373","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"32 - 34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43366864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gender Performance in Jim Shepard’s “Minotaur”","authors":"David McCracken","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2223892","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2223892","url":null,"abstract":"In a 2008 conversation in the Mississippi Review, Jim Shepard self-reports, “My stuff is strange enough that it’s often not mainstream” (202). About a half of a year later, he published “Minotaur” in Playboy. In 2011, Richard Ford anthologized the story in Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar, classifying the text with others composed by T. Coraghessan Boyle, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, ZZ Packer, Joyce Carol Oates, and Tobias Wolff.1 In that same year, the story was also included in Shepard’s You Think That’s Bad. However, reviewers overlook the work’s innovative treatment of cognitive dissonance, generally attributing the nameless narrator’s psychological conflict to marital insecurities related to his defense industry job.2 Actually, the narrator’s dilemma is caused by his misinterpretation of gender performance, specifically his miscalculation of masculine roles within two significant relationships. At the aptly called Windsock, the narrator gauges the authority of masculinity performed during his close friendship with Kenny against that practiced in his marriage with Carly. Over the course of the story, the narrator succumbs to heterosexual masculinity, rejecting the overtones of homosexuality affiliated with ritualistic male bonding. The narrator’s self-assessment of masculine performance is initiated by the unexpected meeting of Kenny and Carly, an occurrence prompting his eventual self-knowledge. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler provides her famous declaration that “gender proves to be performative,” contending gender identity depends upon contextualized actions, “always a doing” (25). She also points out that masculinity is defined by its binary opposition to femininity, and understanding masculinity is “accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire” (23). In other words, masculinity is established through actions responding to institutionalized heterosexuality. In “Minotaur,” the narrator basically scrutinizes his masculine performances in distinctively homosexual and heterosexual intimacies. Arguably, the narrator would reject any inference of homosexual desire for Kenny, yielding to what Butler calls “compulsory heterosexuality” (19). Nevertheless, the narrator’s descriptions of Kenny https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2223892","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"19 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49641453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“A Hunger Artist”: As An Art Performance","authors":"Z. Taheri","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2214673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2214673","url":null,"abstract":"When Gilles Deleuze focused on Kafka’s writings, he had few words to talk about Kafka’s well-known short story, “A Hunger Artist”. Deleuze just referred to ‘fasting’ as a frequent theme repeated throughout Kafka’s works (Kafka, 20). Recently, Zack Horton in an article– “Can you Starve a Body without Organs?– The Hunger Artists of Franz Kafka and Steve McQueen,” presents a different reading of the work. Horton focuses on a Deleuzian concept of “body without organs” and elaborates on the ways Kafka’s artist represents an “anti-producing body in its limit case of public self-induced starvation” to portray a “resistance to capitalist spectators” (117). Later, Horton describes the fasting of Kafka’s artist “as an oscillation between spectacle and art” (119). He uses this description largely to elaborate how Kafka’s artist “never exists as a fully autonomous body” and how “he is only an artist by virtue of his spectators” (119). However, little attention has been paid to the ways in which “fasting as a spectacle” can challenge the established perception of ‘time’ of the “capitalist spectator” and can, thus, alter the way one perceives this world. To this end, this study approaches the fasting of Kafka’s artist more as a “spectacle” so as to discuss how Kafka’s work is similar to performance art and, accordingly, foregrounds Bergson’s conception of time. Furthermore, it discusses how Kafka’s artist like an art performer fails in his task, despite all sacrifices he makes in this consumerist era. Fasting as a spectacle in Kafka’s work has much in common with performance art popularized in the early 70s. Amanda Coogan describes performance art as “the action of the body, the authenticity of an activity” (10). Kafka’s artist has no other art but hollowing out his body. For days, Kafka’s artist like a performance artist sits","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"1 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46049938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Fantasy of Seduction in Kafka’s “The Silence of the Sirens”","authors":"B. Hamamra","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2227372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2227372","url":null,"abstract":"Kafka’s “The Silence of the Sirens”, published posthumously in 1931, is an audacious re-writing of a famous episode in Homer’s Odysseus. The story shows that Ulysses is unknowingly or wittingly seduced by the silence of the Sirens rather than their songs and they are also seduced by Ulysses’visage. In Homer’s story, Odysseus resists the temptation of the Sirens’ deadly song by having himself tied to the mast of his ship, while his oarsmen, ears blocked with beeswax, sail quickly by without succumbing to the seductive, fatal song of the Sirens. Kafka dramatically subverts the Homeric legend of Odysseus by enacting a shift from sound and hearing to silence and sight. In Kafka’s telling of the story, the Sirens fall silent while Ulysses, indifferent to them and their silence, sails by, his ears blocked, his “great eyes” staring in the distance.Thus, Kafka’s version of the myth brings into question Ulysses’cunning that sets himself apart from others.Kafka points out that “To protect himself from the Sirens Ulysses stopped his ears with wax and had himself bound to the mast of his ship” (272). Maurice Blanchot points out that this privilege of Ulysses over his crew is based on his enjoyment and his ability to resist seduction:","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"28 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43182313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Why Thoreau Spent a Night in Jail","authors":"J. Hirsh","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2227374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2227374","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"35 - 36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42818616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“A Mind of Winter”: Affect in Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man”","authors":"Hossein Pirnajmuddin","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2223893","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2223893","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article offers a reading of Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” in terms of its affective affordances. It is argued that the poem rhetorically imagines the possibility of having “a mind of winter” as being incapable of affect, that is, being inhuman. Thus, the central theme of the relation between mind and world is cast as a double encounter between the human and non-human as well as the inhuman and the non-human.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"24 - 27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45300116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}