EXPLICATOR最新文献

{"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":null,"pages":null},"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}

{"title":"Claudia Rankine and Robert Lowell, Again","authors":"Eric Weiskott","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2166393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2166393","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43207152","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":"Temporality in The Overstory by Richard Powers","authors":"L. DeLuca","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2146477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2146477","url":null,"abstract":"In The Overstory by Richard Powers, there is a stark contrast between the temporality of trees and humans. Although Powers depicts trees as eternally static, he demonstrates how trees are enduring symbols used for memorialization. Contrastingly, Powers portrays humans as being temporary, both by nature individually and in their destructive behaviors as a collective; in both senses, Powers portrays humanity as operating in a quick-time, inhabiting a speedy temporal plane. In the convergence of these temporalities, which only occurs when humans get a glimpse of tree-time, humans are able to experience the stasis of trees, allowing them to live their lives more slowly. Powers depicts trees as enduring, so much so that they are often used as memorials. Powers describes Olivia five times as being called to aid “the most wondrous products of four billion years of life,” which underscores the ancient nature of trees (The Overstory, p.165;170;264;336;493). Through this repetition, one can see how the emphasis of the oldness of trees is often injected into scenes including Olivia, who is in tune with the presence of trees; it is as though her gift of understanding the strange presence makes the ancient legible. Moreover, Powers not only characterizes trees as old, but eternal as well. For example, when planting chestnuts, Nick thinks: “One day, my children will shake the trunks and eat for free” (The Overstory, p.6); this reveals his expectation that trees will survive long enough for his children to enjoy them, in spite of the environmental crisis occurring caused by pollution and global warming. Because of their enduring nature, trees are also used as sites of memorial: the Hoel Chestnut acts as a tombstone for John Hoel’s father as well as a marker for the time capsule, the mulberry tree becomes Winston Ma’s memorial, as this is where he commits suicide, and planting trees functions as commemoration for Ray and Dorothy’s relationship, as their yearly planting tradition stops when their relationship fails (The Overstory, p.10;13;41;168;211). It is therefore clear that the enduring nature of trees lends them to being tools of memorialization. https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2146477","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48428064","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":"Heathcliff as the masculine counterpart of androgynous Catherine in Wuthering Heights","authors":"Xihua Meng","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2205578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2205578","url":null,"abstract":"Androgyny is first introduced to literary criticism by Virginia Woolf. She proclaims that “in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man”.1 It is “an ideal plan of human soul, which surpasses traditional gender classification and possesses more active potentials”.2 “The nineteenth century saw an increasingly widespread and articulate statement of women’s claims”.3 Therefore, as a writer in the first half of the nineteenth century, it would have been impossible for Emily Brontë to compose a novel expressing her feminist ideas clearly and obviously, or to organize a campaign against the patriarchal system. She chose to expose her plea for equal rights by a smart textual strategy: making Catherine an androgynous character. Under the disguise of Heathcliff, a male character, Catherine fights against social prejudice and defends her right to equality. Emily is “clever, benevolent but very stubborn: ‘Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone’”.4 Emily was not a standard Victorian woman, who was expected to be mild, obedient, elegant, and refined. In the Victorian era, it was difficult for women to start a literary career because they were believed to be the “angels in the house”.5 However, Emily and her sisters sought equality with men, even though the patriarchal system in the Victorian era oppressed women. But even in a feminine mind, the male counterpart cannot be suppressed forever. Emily Brontë showed this in Wuthering Heights, and Catherine reveals this in her actions. Catherine is mischievous, but confined by Victorian values. Though she receives a conventional genteel education, her androgynous character is formed during her rebellion against injustice toward women. As an androgynous girl, she performs the feminine and masculine parts of her personality on different occasions. Whenever Catherine’s rebellious spirit seeks revenge for unjust social conventions, Heathcliff comes to life. When Catherine wants to uphold https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2205578","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45647840","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":"Symbolic Images of Butterflies in Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek","authors":"W. Kim","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2165433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2165433","url":null,"abstract":"Perhaps one of the most significant animal images employed by Nikos Kazantzakis in Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba (1946) is that of butterflies—with the possible exception of a parrot in its cage. He makes repeated use of butterflies throughout the entire novel, one of the most wellknown works of modern Greek and world literature. Although the image of the caged parrot symbolically promotes a tragic view of the human condition, that of the butterflies has a variety of different meanings. In other words, the symbolic meanings of the butterflies vary greatly depending on the context in which the symbol is used. It explains, at least in part, that the images of the butterflies is not merely applicable to one particular character but to the various characters of the novel. Inarguably, Kazantzskis uses these images as a way to underscore the varied themes of the novel: the futility of human aspiration, spiritual rebirth, lost youth, human mortality, articitic creativity, among many other things. The image of butterflies is introduced early in Zorba the Greek. In Chapter 8, the rainy weather makes the unnamed first-person narrator, whom Alexis Zorba affectionately calls “Boss,” so emotional and sentimental that he feels almost like bursting into tears. He compares a drooping human soul to a rain-soaked butterfly: “These entirely sorrowful hours of light rain are sensual, as if your soul, a butterfly, were being drenched and thereby forced to sink into the ground” (107). All the bitter memories, hidden like rainwater in the depths of his mind, suddenly come to the surface. In this sentimental mood, the narrator goes on to say that lost hopes resemble “wingless butterflies reduced to worms that now creep over your heart’s essence, devouring it” (107). In this scene, the butterflies connote not only the human soul but also the futility of human aspiration. By contrast, the cocoon, inside which the pupa of many moths is protected, is closely related to the human body and its mundaneness. https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2165433","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41500302","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 literal reading of the shadow in “Ligeia:” Coleridge’s remarks on Ghosts and Poe’s poetics of misdirection","authors":"Pedro Madeira","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2164167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2164167","url":null,"abstract":"The reader of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” (1838) is called upon to decide whether the purported resurrection of the title-character is a bona fide miracle or a delusion. Before answering this question, however, one must first tackle the more fundamental challenge of establishing what the first-person narrator, the sole witness of these events, thinks happened. Given the lack of clear, unambiguous statements of fact in his report, this is no easy task. He suggests that his dead first wife Ligeia came back as a ghost to kill, or perhaps hasten the death, of her already debilitated successor, Rowena, maybe by dropping some mysterious fluid, which he is not sure he saw, in her wine. Four nights later, during Rowena’s wake, which was held in the same room, her corpse seems to be gradually replaced by Ligeia’s body throughout a weird succession of incomplete reanimations. Finally, the narrator tells us, Ligeia “advanced bodily and palpably” from Rowena’s bed of death, although he admits she shrunk “from my touch” before he could quite get a hold of her (Poe 329, 330). Yet, despite all these inconsistencies, the narrator’s supernatural explanation remained virtually unchallenged until 1944, when Roy P. Basler contended that the wonders he mentions “must be understood as (...) hallucinations” (368). In 1973, however, G. R. Thompson argued that it was impossible to “know anything the narrator has told us is ‘real,’” and that therefore, in order to appreciate the full effect of the tale, the reader was required to “think one theory and feel the other” (97, 103). This matched that writer’s overall assessment of Poe, who he thought had attempted to convey a sense of “despair over the ability of the mind to know anything,” thereby taking the Romantic distrust of rationality to new and unheard-of extremes (69). https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2164167","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46802918","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":"Ted Hughes’s “The Jaguar” and Animal Ethics","authors":"Toshiaki Komura","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2200155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2200155","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the twenty-first century, particularly post-2019, we are compelled to reexamine the ethical and philosophical grounds of human-centered thinking and to ponder earnestly about the moral dimensions of engaging with nonhuman animals. This essay explicates Ted Hughes’s “The Jaguar” as presenting a double-vision of human perspectives and animal perspectives in its portrayal of a jaguar in a zoo cage. On the one hand, the jaguar is depicted as a visionary, whose spiritual freedom is unconstrained by its physical captivity. On the other hand, the feline is shown to be a captive animal displaying signs of distress. The poetic ambiguity of “The Jaguar” prompts the reader to imagine what might be the jaguar’s state of “flourishing,” in light of Martha Nussbaum’s theory of capabilities approach to animal welfare. By revealing the complexity of what it means to think through animal perspectives, Hughes’s “The Jaguar” urges us to develop metacognition about how we see and understand nonhuman animals.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49100937","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":"Ambiguity in Yeats’s “the Hosting of the Sidhe”","authors":"Thomas Dilworh","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2184678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184678","url":null,"abstract":"The host is riding from Knocknare and over the grave of clooth-na-Bare; caoilte tossing his buring hair, and Niamh calling Away, come away: Empty your heart of its mortal dream, The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam, Our arms are waving, our lips are apart; And if any gaze on our rushing band, We come between him and the deed of his hand, We come between him and the hope of his heart. The host is rushing ‘twixt night and day, and where is there hope or deed as fair? caoilte tossing his burning hair, and Niamh calling Away, come away.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47717025","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 Exile Within: An LGBTQ+ Reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Prodigal”","authors":"Jocelyn Heath","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2205012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2205012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay proposes a new reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Prodigal”—traditionally read as a parable of the poet’s own alcoholism—as a deeply veiled account of the multiple exiles faced by LGBTQ+ individuals in Bishop’s era: geographic through ostracism and psychological through internalized homophobia. Using evidence established by Bethany Hicok of embedded “code” language for homosexuality by lesbian writers at Bishop’s alma mater Vassar College, the essay argues that the same such codes appear in “The Prodigal” and offer an alternate reading for the protagonist’s exile and self-castigation. Bishop’s known use of gender inversion is one such code used to distance her writer-self from a personally challenging subject. The argument also draws on Lorrie Goldensohn’s analysis of cage and lightning imagery as confinement and insight, respectively. Finally, the essay explores the intense and grotesque physical imagery of the barn and its inhabitants to delve into the conflicted experience being queer while struggling with internalized homophobia as a means of understanding how multifaceted the experience of exile was for the LGBTQ+ community in this era. We observe how deeply distanced from autobiography such content had to be to avoid danger to the writer.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46807215","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":"“Of coyotes and werewolves: Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero”","authors":"Todd Giles","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2164168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2164168","url":null,"abstract":"To date, Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 Less than Zero has understandably lacked an ecocritical reading due to its explicit depiction of sexual violence, over-thetop consumerism, rampant drug use, vapid characters, and crippling alienation. Ellis scholarship tends, in various ways, to examine LTZ as an exploration of the emptiness of our consumption-ridden mass-media world, whether it is Freese’s entropy and the “MTV novel” (1990), Sahlin’s “existential dilemma” (1991), Young’s exploration of place in a world without moral imperatives (1992), Annesley’s “blank fiction” (1988) and, most recently, Dehghan and Sadjadi’s Baudrillardian look at consumption and media (2021). However, when we consider the numerous references to the “wild” encroaching the boundaries protecting the carefully manufactured Garden of LA in the form of tree-felling winds, torrential rains, home-destroying mudslides, scorching temperatures, and cat-eating coyotes, Ellis’s novel can be read not only as a condemnation of constructing our Western Eden in the first place, but also as a point of contact for considering Clay’s (and our) place in the posthuman world. I argue that Clay, the novel’s narrator, finds himself adrift in a world where long-accepted distinctions between inside/outside and domesticated/wild are no longer tenable in an LA which, by the 1980s, had long since lost the farmland buffer that kept the wilds of desert and mountains at bay. Without this manufactured agricultural zone shielding metropolitan LA, a new space was created in which the perceived culture/nature boundaries are traversed, heightening Clay’s sense of alienation. These crossings are most prevalent where the wild and the urban intersect in areas of flux and transition known as ecotones. According to Irene Klaver, “An ecotone is an interface between two ecosystems and is often a more complex ecosystem by combining the previous two into a new third, with its own processes and species” (46). And, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2164168","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47864206","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}