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{"title":"“Born in the Wrong Body”: Fragmentation of the Self in Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis","authors":"B. Hamamra","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2211250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2211250","url":null,"abstract":"Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis depicts a fluid and elusive subjectivity that resists fixed gender norms and highlights the endless search for meaning and identity. According to Selina Busby and Stephen Farrier, “the majority of Kane’s work can be situated within a queer frame” (142). Busby and Farrier contextualize Kane’s theatrical oeuvre within the framework of queer theory and its societal implications, arguing that her plays emerged at a specific historical and cultural juncture. “This historical moment was the 1990s, the same period in which queer became increasingly powerful on the street as a form of protest and in the academy as a subject (Butler’s key text for queers, Gender Trouble was published in 1990)” (143) By examining Kane’s plays through a queer theoretical lens, Busby and Farrier highlight the theme of fluidity of identity that pervades her texts:","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":"48480071","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 Phenomena of Nothingness in de la Mare’s “The Listeners”","authors":"Biswarup Das","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2184677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184677","url":null,"abstract":"In his 1912 poem “The Listeners,” the English poet Walter de la Mare1 (1873–1956) presents a “lonely Traveller” (20)2 who comes to a house in a forest at night but fails to meet anyone. His3 knocking “on the moonlit door” (2) and repeated callings remain unanswered. Finally, he departs, asking the “phantom listeners” (13) inside the house to tell the house dwellers that he “came, and no one answered,/That [he] kept [his] word” (27–28). Readers and scholars have interpreted “The Listeners” in several ways.4 However, an important issue about the poem has nonetheless been overlooked. Studied closely, it becomes evident that the story of the Traveler betokens the nothingness one inescapably comes across in the world. In 1943, thirty-one years after the poem’s publication, the French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre (1905– 80) painstakingly dealt with the human experience of nothingness in his magnum opus Being and Nothingness. Intriguingly, the various ways de la Mare’s Traveler encounters nothingness bear striking parallels with the ones Sartre presents in his work. As such, the motif of nothingness becomes a curious issue in the poem. However, before exploring the motif of nothingness in “The Listeners,” it is necessary to mention that nothingness is never present in the world. It is because the world’s constituents, which Sartre calls matters, are wholly positive (Manser 47). They are positive for being self-contained, timeless, and without differentiation. However, they are also inert, making the world meaningless (Spade 76–85). The world acquires meaning as human consciousness is projected on it. Now, the meaning formed in this way is phenomenal, infusing the positive world with negations. It is because consciousness is negative by nature. Instead of being situated in itself, consciousness belongs to the matter it is aware of and changes by shifting from one object to another. Sartre states, “[consciousness] is not what it is and is what it is not” (Sartre 21). https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184677","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":"44924777","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 Lacanian subject in Robert Frost’s “the road not taken”","authors":"Weina Fan","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2146478","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2146478","url":null,"abstract":"Previous research regarding Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” mainly concerns who is the real poet or speaker in the poem. James L. Potter argues that the poet in the poem is Edward Thomas in that Frost is “mocking Thomas’ habit of fretting over choices, present and past” (52). R. F. Fleissner proposes that Frost’s “poetic intent was clearly enough to promote Thomas only, not himself (or also himself)” (22). In contrast, Larry Finger claims that the true poet is Frost despite that Frost did write the poem “with Edward Thomas in mind” (76). Similarly, David Ketterer claims that Frost, as the speaker of the poem, hints at “his life and identity” (78). Furthermore, Henry Hart notes that the poem “drew on an experience Frost had while walking in the woods near Plymouth, New Hampshire, before he had even met Thomas” (176). The debate seems to be focused on the identity of the speaker, namely, that of the speaking “I” which, in a Lacanian sense, is only the ego of Frost. In this article, I seek to read the poem in terms of the Lacanian subject through which I aim to invalidate the debate regarding the identity of the speaker, be it Thomas or Frost, and to delve into Frost’s unconscious. The Lacanian subject essentially differs from the Cartesian subject in that the former is the subject of the unconscious which is “structured like a language” (Lacan, Four Concepts: 203). Lacan further distinguishes that “the subject of the enunciation is definitely not to be confused with the one who takes the opportunity to say of himself I, as subject of the utterance... The I, as it appears in any utterance, is nothing more than what we call a shifter” (Lacan, My Teaching: 85). On the other hand, the subject of the statement, as Bruce Fink argues, “corresponds to the level of the ego, a constructed self taken to be the master of its own thoughts” (Fink 43). In this light, the debate concerning whether Thomas or Frost is the real speaker is of little significance since the “I,” as a shifter, represents only the ego of Frost which takes on various forms. Whether Frost wrote the https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2146478","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":"43578048","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":"MUCH MADNESS: The Horatian Conceit of the Mad Poet in Emily Dickinson","authors":"A. L. Moore","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2184245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184245","url":null,"abstract":"The precise sense of the “Madness” from Emily Dickinson’s frequently anthologized poem “Much Madness is divinest Sense” may be more specific than previous explications of the poem have allowed; in fact, one may interpret such madness in the literary poetic context as an allusion to Horace’s impressionistic and somewhat quirky conceit of the mad poet as expounded upon in Ars Poetica. In Horace’s time, writing during the Augustan age in Rome, theories concerning the poet’s inspired madness were ubiquitous. The notion of a divinely inspired poet both afflicted and blessed by madness (μανία) certainly preceded Horace, dating back to Hellenistic antiquity and said to date back to Democritus (Hadju 32). In her paradoxical poem, as a reclusive and largely uncelebrated “poetess” of her time, Dickinson alludes to the mad poet conceit in the opening line, lending much of the gravity of the Western poetic tradition to her own declaration of artistic license. Dorothea Steiner has commented that “[w]hile madness was ‘divinest sense’ in a poet, it was considered an aberration in a ‘poetess’” (59). Certainly Dickinson herself living in a patriarchal, Puritanical era would have been regarded as something of an aberration by many of her peers—“a mad lady who put words together in an interesting way” (Greene 68), but the traditional classical notion of a divinely inspired poetess was not unprecedented https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184245","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":"48604056","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":"‘Ac ic to þam grunde genge’: an analogue for Genesis B, line 834a","authors":"Joseph St. John","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2164169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2164169","url":null,"abstract":"The Old English verse passage known as Genesis B , a translation from Old Saxon that has been preserved in the Junius 11 manuscript, 1 retells the apoc-ryphal angelic rebellion and Adam and Eve’s lapse that forms part of the Book of Genesis. The passage, which modifies its biblical source in significant ways, 2 comes to a close with Adam and Eve’s extra-biblical expression of remorse and regret immediately following their lapse, in lines 765 b-851, before God’s arrival on the scene. 3 This paper focuses on Adam’s extra-biblical expression of remorse and repentance. It proposes that the poem’s expression of this theme is influenced by Job 38.16. Allusion to this verse from the Book of Job, I argue, serves two functions. In the first place, it affirms Adam’s readiness to undergo penance. Secondly, it suggests that Adam and Eve may only be saved through Christ. This second point transpires from the Christian exegetical tradition relating to Job 38.16. I","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":"45073230","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":"Resisting Defense in Moore’s “Armor’s Undermining Modesty”","authors":"D. D. de Villiers","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2184246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184246","url":null,"abstract":"Although there are a handful of compelling readings – among which I would single out those of Ellen Levy and of Heather White and Luke Carson – of Marianne Moore’s “Armor’s Undermining Modesty,” none of them properly account for the significance of the opening lines, which stop short of clearly representing the speaker’s defensive reaction to an assumed “pest.” From the tone we might infer relative calm and restraint; indeed, part of the poem’s appeal lies in the knowing, mildly ironic quality of the voice, which seems sure-footed despite the eccentricity of its steps. Even so, the poem indeed does develop from a moment of misidentification – “At first I thought a pest/ must have alighted on my wrist” (lines 1–2) – that may also have involved annoyance, perhaps even recoil or brief panic. That this misidentification and the defensive attitude implicit in it are key themes is clear enough; nevertheless, the reader is left in the awkward position of having to entertain the speaker’s reflections in the wake of an error. Moreover, nothing in the speaker’s approach suggests an explicit attempt to recover trust, even though her tone and attitude may inspire confidence. In fact, it is precisely because of this refusal – which accommodates her frank concessions to irony – that the speaker does come across as being invested and in earnest. She does not speak from some moral high ground or enclave of virtue. Yet it is difficult for the reader to accost her; it is as if each statement – decisive enough when considered in isolation – turns out to have been born of accident or coincidence. Here I am mindful of the readings of Levy (70–71) and of White and Carson (77), both of which provide ample evidence of the poem’s continual generation of new intratextual connections by means of homophony, pun, oxymoron, rhyme, alliteration, and so forth, since such inflections complicate the thematic thread. The poem’s procedure, then, is aligned with its interest in contingencies, even though it knows itself to be driven, like the reader, by the desire for https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2184246","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":"49192135","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 Attachments in Tennessee Williams’ “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”","authors":"Kewei Chen","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2205577","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2205577","url":null,"abstract":"Queerness has been a staunch presence throughout Tennessee Williams’ dazzling oeuvre. Compared with his famed plays, his achievement in short fiction is critically underrated. Gore Vidal deems Williams’ short stories as the “true memoir” of the writer, the candor of which even surpassed his autobiography (xxii). Dennis Vannatta argues that while Williams “failed to deal honestly... in his plays with the issue of homosexuality,” this subject has become “frequently and directly dramatized over the remainder of his short-fiction career” (x). Michael S. D. Hooper notes Williams’ short fiction as a parallel endeavor alongside the playwriting: Unlike his commercial theater where sexual expressions are “diluted,” Williams’ early short stories “tackle gay experiences head on” (96-97). The studies above unanimously pinpoint Williams’ short-fiction, less trammeled by censorship, as an unfading asset for unraveling his sexual politics imbricated with material minutiae. “Portrait of a Girl in Glass’ is critically considered the basis for the fulllength play The Glass Menagerie (1945). Tom Wingfield—the first-person narrator—is a young poet who works at a warehouse as the breadwinner to support his mother and sister, after his father’s desertion years ago. His sister Laura Wingfield quits business school and idles away her life among an “infinite number of little glass ornaments” left behind by their estranged father (Williams 98). The overbearing mother pushes Laura toward marriage by forcing Tom to bring home a gentleman-caller—also his fellow worker— named Jim Delaney. While Laura starts to enjoy his company, Jim inadvertently reveals his engagement to another girl. The visit ends in the mother’s disappointment. Afterwards, Tom leaves his hometown and becomes a drifter, yet still haunted by the memory of his sister. This essay focuses exclusively on “Portrait” as a self-contained text as I probe into the story’s intertextual entanglements with Gene Stratton-Porter’s potently homoerotic novel Freckles (1915). By extricating the homoerotic elements embedded in and mediated https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2205577","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":"41889688","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":"Rereading the Postscript in “Bartleby, the Scrivener”","authors":"Douglas Schaak","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2205576","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2205576","url":null,"abstract":"In a move reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s maddening tendency to toss his famished readers a few crumbs of interpretive sustenance, Herman Melville offers his readers the tantalizing postscript in “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” After 15,000 words of not giving us what we are craving—namely, a satisfying clue to Bartleby’s identity or behavior—the narrator relates “one little item of rumor” (Melville 73) that might hold “a certain suggestive interest” (73). The morsel we are given is that “Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration” (73). The scholarship devoted to the postscript has examined at length both the Dead Letter Office and the dead letters themselves. What seems to have gone unnoticed, however, is the significance of the “suddenly removed” part of this revelation. In what follows I argue that the postscript is of tremendous importance because the possibility of Bartleby’s being suddenly removed from his DLO job is the key to understanding his unusual behavior. Although the narrator downplays the DLO revelation with disclaimers, he acts on that information as if it were true. As such, it is fair for readers to treat this “rumor” as accurate biographical information. Thomas Mitchell says that “Bartleby ... reveals nothing about himself ” (330). He certainly reveals very little, but due to this sparsity what Bartleby does reveal is magnified. In his final office conversation with the narrator, Bartleby states simply, “I like to be stationary” (69). Because Bartleby tends to state things negatively, his naming a specific preference is noteworthy. The first thing the narrator says upon meeting Bartleby is “a motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold” (45). He then offers a stream of observations that reinforce Bartleby’s stationary existence: “he never went anywhere” (50); “He was a perpetual sentry in the corner” (50); “Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall revery” (59); “Bartleby remained standing at the window in one of his profoundest dead-wall reveries” (64); “Bartleby would remain standing immovable in the middle of the room” (65), and so on. In addition to these observations, Bartleby’s own words express his desire https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2205576","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":"45437823","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":"Moral Dogma and Ethical Relativity in Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly","authors":"Subhadeepta Ray, Goutam Karmakar","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2200156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2200156","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper studies the intricate treatment of the abstract and dogmatic order of imperial, racial, and religious morality, and the issue of ethical commitment in the concrete and fleeting relationships between individual subjects in Joseph Conrad’s debut novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895). The novel is set in the Malay Archipelago, where the fading years of the imperial absolutism of Europe give way to conflicting trade and political interests. A pessimistic philosophical outlook in Conrad’s text shows how all the overindulgent narcissistic moral orders accommodate hate and self-interest motivated conspiracy, and simultaneously violate ethical demands of the Other in human contact.","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":"46423362","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":"Middle English araten and Scenes of Condescension in Piers Plowman","authors":"Joon-Won Park, Eric Weiskott","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2100239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2100239","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Among the English words first recorded in William Langland’s Piers Plowman is araten “reprove.” This new, or newly literary, word encapsulates a peculiar quality of Piers Plowman, its cyclical depiction of verbal combat between opponents with unequal cultural authority. The word araten is perfect for Piers Plowman and plausibly was coined to purpose. This note suggests that araten cuts both ways in Piers Plowman’s multilayered analysis of class, and more broadly that visions of reproof with their political, social, literary, and theological implications were a central form through which Langland extended the A text into the B and C versions.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42771350","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}