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{"title":"Religion and the Theology of Love in W. H. Auden’s “Stop all the clocks”","authors":"Cicero Bruce","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2100238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2100238","url":null,"abstract":"“Stop all the clocks” (also known as “Funeral Blues”) is an enduring short poem of four quatrains that resists facile interpretations. Its first two stanzas originally appeared (on pages 116-17) in The Ascent of F6, a play written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood. Discussed here with reference to his Collected Poems, in which it appears (on page 120) as number IX under the title “Twelve Songs,” the poem is typical of W. H. Auden’s early verse: its first half having been severed from its original context as mere dialogue in a play, the poem’s meaning is seemingly ambiguous. In the context of Auden’s moral vision, however, the poem is decidedly religious, and its organizing theme is essentially love, understood in a particularly spiritual or philosophical sense. Much of the rhetoric inhering in the language of “Stop all the clocks” is of a Christian tenor that is both conventional and not. Take the speaker’s proclamations in the third stanza, for instance; they do no doubt connote something of a ubiquitously, if unconventionally described, divine presence: “He was my North, my South, my East and West/My working week and my Sunday rest.” The departed was the speaker’s very grounding in space and time, as God is the ontological essence in which Christians believe themselves to live, move, and have their being. The imagery is clear: he who has died organized the speaker’s cosmos as God ordered the universe with the six-day creation of heaven and earth and consecration of the Sabbath; the deceased was the speaker’s very substance of existence, as Christ, Son of God, is understood in Christology to be the blood of life. Readers familiar with Auden’s life and work will certainly concede that such a reading is plausible, for they are aware that four years after the poem’s publication in 1936 Auden returned to the Church of England through the Episcopal equivalent in America where he and Isherwood, seen off from London by E. M. Forster, immigrated in 1939. If we read the lines as religious expression, as Auden invites us to do with his decision to republish them as a freestanding poem separated from and without reference to The Ascent of https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2100238","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44074874","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 Subaltern in the Ibis Trilogy","authors":"S. Sekar","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2080524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2080524","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Are the stories of the subaltern just as important as those of our national heroes and leaders, who are considered architects of our nation? How does one define the subaltern? What is the Subaltern Studies project? Does the charge of elitism in the historiography of Indian nationalism hold water? How does the Ibis Trilogy by Amitav Ghosh tackle these issues surrounding the subaltern and their representation in our national history? How does he redefine the nation for us through a multidimensional perspective? What are the historical strategies employed by Ghosh, to this end?","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58963020","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":"“Absent subjectivity in Poe’s THE MAN OF THE CROWD”","authors":"Xiaoli Li","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2080519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2080519","url":null,"abstract":"Edgar Allan Poe says in the first sentence that “it does not permit itself to be read,” to build a myth in “The Man of the Crowd,” which refuses to be decoded. Compared with the plot, the story is more structurally attractive to readers. Accordingly, much formalistic efforts have been made in examining the narrative strategies of the story, such as “‘ambiguity’, ‘irony’, ‘doubleness,’ and ‘unreliability’” (Cananau 242). As Iulian Cananau observes, “[a] more recent formalist inquiry, inspired by poststructuralism and genre criticism, reads ‘The Man of the Crowd’ not against the socio-cultural context, but against a ‘literary’ one that consists of the broader framework of Gothic fiction and a representative selection of Poe’s other canonical short stories” (242). This inquiry, applied in analyzing the reading process of the reader, can be extended to the “reading process” of the narrator who follows the old man for a long time and yet fails to figure out the old man’s secret, which might lead to the conclusion that Poe, by exhibiting the futility of pursuing meaning, turns the short story into a symbol of empty subjectivity. However, it will be a more enlightening effort when we pay attention to the narrator’s keen interest in following the old man, which structurally shapes the short story into a double-layered pursuit. It exhibits Poe’s textual endeavor to portray the theme of the story: emptiness in subjectivity, one of the heated topics of Lacanian theory, which, in probing the relationship between language and identity, exhibits diversified textual features among different literary works. For example, in the interpretation of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Pyeaam Abbasi argues that Prufrock’s failure to become a “speaking subject” in the symbolic order of language leads to a “neurotic” Prufrock (118). To some extent, Lacanian theory is so deconstructive that the gap between the symbolic order and imaginative order cannot be bridged even for a speaking subject. Accordingly, when we take the narrator as a speaking subject in “The Man of the Crowd,” the short https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2080519","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48737699","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":"Seamus Heaney’s “Failed” Elegy and the Nonhuman Subject: A Reading of “Widgeon”","authors":"Huiwen Shi","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2080523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2080523","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In addition to linguistic and cultural mediations, Seamus Heaney’s work also situates itself between life and death. Often his poetry is perceived as elegiac, with the loss of rural life and agricultural crafts, the end of innocence and childhood, memories of late family members, and the deaths in the conflicts in Northern Ireland, all becoming subjects of his mourning. This paper examines Heaney’s unique treatment of a nonhuman death in “Widgeon”, one of his shortest and least examined poems. In this poem, the dead body is exposed, and its voice takes over the human elegiac cry. Importantly, the poem raises the ethical question of the living misreading the dead in elegy. Failing to reach consolation, it arrives at an unexpected irresolution, unresting the dead as well as arresting the living.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45076682","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":"Absalom, Absalom! And Acts Misreading","authors":"Sunggyung Jo","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2080520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2080520","url":null,"abstract":"In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, an older Thomas Sutpen asks himself, “[w]here did I make the mistake in [the past], what did I do or misdo in it”? (212). Sutpen’s “mistake” or “misdeed” throughout his life is connected with his role as a reader—of books and, more broadly, of the world around him. In this essay, I conceptualize Sutpen’s failed and subjective interpretations as misreadings—so as to account for both his literal acts of reading texts, and his metaphoric acts of reading and of interpreting the actual world. Sutpen’s overall failure to create his ideal genealogy is associated with his limited hermeneutic capacity to process and interpret both actual texts and the past. Let me begin with a scene involving Thomas Sutpen’s initial reading practices when still in school: here, let me propose a genealogy of misreading originating in Sutpen’s own initial misreading of a book as a child. In Chapter 7, Quentin narrates stories about Sutpen’s childhood which he had heard from his grandfather General Compson (Quentin’s grandfather and Sutpen’s only friend in Jefferson). Here, Sutpen describes to General Compson the time when he had attended school for a short period, after having descended from the mountains where he had been born and bred. According to Quentin, young Sutpen, who at the time lacked any experience and knowledge of society, had no resources other than the books his teacher read to students: “So I listened when he [the teacher] would read to us... whatever the reason, he read to us and I anyway listened, though I did not know that in that listening I was equipping myself better for what I should later design to do than if I had learned all the addition and subtraction in the book” (Faulkner 195). In this passage about Sutpen’s initial reading act, Sutpen hears stories about the West Indies, “a place called the West Indies to which poor men went in ships and became rich” (195), and the opportunities for economic success, a story to which he will return for his own “design.” As it turns out, Sutpen does indeed decide to go to the West Indies, “remember[ing] what [the teacher] had read” (196), and then becomes a very successful man, just as the story had promised. In this scene, reading is an act of listening to someone else reading a book aloud (“I listened when he [the teacher] would https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2080520","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46591760","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":"Winston’s Parallel Universe: On History in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four","authors":"Jan-Boje Frauen","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2080521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2080521","url":null,"abstract":"A most peculiar claim about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) can be found in the non-fictional part of a commissioned book on Orwell by his fellow novelist Anthony Burgess: “Somebody in 1949 told me [...] that Orwell had wanted to call it Nineteen Forty-Eight. But they wouldn’t let him” (Burgess and Biswell 10). One naturally tends to take this claim as merely one more indication that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a twisted satire of Orwell’s present, rather than a serious vision of a future to come. After all, one seems to be encouraged not to take the statement too seriously by Burgess’s vagueness about his source of information (“somebody told me”) and it is widely known that the novel’s working title was The Last Man in Europe, not Nineteen Forty-Eight. However, the main reason why one disregards the possibility is that it just does not seem to make much sense. Yes, England’s postwar, Labor forties might have been miserable, as Burgess shows in great detail, but they sure were nothing like the totalitarian nightmare of “Oceania” and “Ingsoc” (English Socialism) that Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith has to endure. However, an argument in support of Burgess’s strange claim can perhaps be made by employing The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, “the book” within the book that displays the political dynamics and history of Winston’s world. The attentive reader quickly notices that the history described in “the book” does not seem to match ours. Meant here are not events that happened after 1948, when Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. More importantly, events leading up to 1948 do not seem to match our timeline either. The most striking discrepancy is perhaps that the Second World War, the event that defined today’s geo-political reality like no other and should have been on Orwell’s mind like no other event when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four shortly after the war, is nowhere mentioned in “the book.” Instead, Winston learns that “by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian” (Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four 184). Instead of fighting a global war, the authoritarian regimes https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2080521","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42495237","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":"Words as Readymade: Mina Loy’s Verbal Portraiture of “Gertrude Stein” and “Joyce’s Ulysses”","authors":"Bowen Wang","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2080522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2080522","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Between 1919 and 1930, Mina Loy created a series of pictorial and poetic portraits of her artistic contemporaries: from pen-ink sketches such as Constantin Brancusi, Carl Van Vechten, Jules Pascin, Marianne Moore, to linguistically innovative verses like “‘Joyce’s Ulysses,” “Gertrude Stein,” “Nancy Cunard,” and a note “William Carlos Williams.” In interacting with avant-gardists of her time, Loy explored new patterns of expression as an alternative to literary and cultural conventions. This paper will thus investigate the use of readymade words in two of Loy’s artist-portrait poems depicting Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Her verbal portraits do not merely offer the reader a poetic profile of modernist artists and their formal experimentation. It will be demonstrated at the end of this paper that, by treating the word as readymade, Loy and her portrayed writers are able to articulate a different form of language that is more fluid, plastic, and performative.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42667331","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 Wartime State and the Cigarette: Darkness and Temporality in Pale Horse, Pale Rider","authors":"Andre Ye","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2063706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2063706","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Although often overlooked due to its sparse occurrence, the symbol of the cigarette offers a new model to understand key themes of darkness and temporality in Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Adam is Miranda’s metaphorical cigarette, a device of light and relief from a society pervaded by the darkness of war and sickness. Despite Miranda’s pleas, Adam is committed to his guaranteed extinguishment serving in the war. The driving motion throughout the novella is that of an unspoken but relentless temporality - the metaphorical cigarette flame ceases into darkness as Adam’s departure nears. This temporality can be understood as a creation of the wartime state, whose systematic movement and organization of human life dominate Adam’s being and hence controls Miranda’s psychological being and self-relation to her world. Porter’s work illustrates the devastating power of the wartime state to impose the metaphysics of inevitable darkness upon its citizens.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47276356","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":"We Are All Cain: Thomas Wolfe’s Transformation of Biblical Myth in “The Lost Boy”","authors":"Nathaniel H. Preston","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2063707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2063707","url":null,"abstract":"With its themes of loss and disconnection, multiple narrators, and vivid sensory descriptions, Thomas Wolfe’s “The Lost Boy” is a classic work of American modernism and a staple of literature survey classes.1 The story is an autobiographical reminiscence of Wolfe’s older brother Grover, called Robert in the text, who died of typhoid during the family’s stay in St. Louis during the 1904 World’s Fair. Much has been written on “The Lost Boy,” with most critics focusing on Wolfe’s use of multiple narrators and treatment of memory. Hayashi Ichiro, for instance, views the story as a collection of “patterns arising as the characters recall the past against the backdrop of their consciousness of time’s objective and linear progression” (78).2 Ruth Winchester Ware explores Wolfe’s search for meaning through remembrance, considering how “we carry memories of the deceased with us into the future and incorporate aspects of the other into our own lives” (60). Paula Gallant Eckard likewise examines the way the story’s three first-person narrators remember Robert, contrasting the mother’s “memorializing” with the sister’s “bridge to Grover” and with the final narrator’s struggle “to reconcile memory and grief, the past and the present, and the sense of loss and dislocation he feels” (15, 16, 17). What critics have not noticed is how in “The Lost Boy” Wolfe emphasizes the difficulty of this struggle by rewriting the myth of Cain and Abel. The text establishes strong parallels between Robert and Cain. Just as Cain is Abel’s elder brother, Robert is older than story’s final narrator who functions as Wolfe’s surrogate. All four narrators describe Robert in ways that match the conventional image of Cain as dark-complexioned and marked by God’s curse. His sister, for example, remarks on his “black eyes” and “olive skin” (2011), and his birthmark, “a berry of warm brown” (2001), is mentioned no less than six times in the story. Further, Robert resembles the biblical Cain, who was “a tiller of the ground” (Genesis 4:2),3 in his interest in agriculture: Robert pesters a fellow traveler on the train to St. Louis with questions about the size and produce of the farms in Indiana (2010). Even Cain’s offering of https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2063707","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44029276","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":"“Us He Devours”: Christianity and Its Use of Human Fear in T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion”1","authors":"D. Kaczynski","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2046537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2046537","url":null,"abstract":"Both incarnations of the tiger in T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion” unequivocally refer to Jesus Christ as opposed to his biblical image of a lamb.2 Victor Strandberg argues that the appearance of Christ as “the tiger” suggests a “sense of self-judgment, this sense of inadequacy, a sense of spiritual failure on Gerontion’s part and we could surmise on T. S. Eliot’s part” as well.3 However, while writing his poem within seven years of his conversion into AngloCatholicism, Eliot hardly seems to adopt the perspective of an erring non-believer. I would argue that the tiger is a deliberate reversal of the traditional idea of Christ as a lamb, which foregrounds the idea of spiritual division rather than unity in the poem and implies that it is fear rather than love that ensures one’s belief. We may note that “Christ the tiger” which “Came” “In the juvescence of the year” is “To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk.”4 With a possible reference to the Trinitarian nature of God, these last three words suggest a division of the evoked celebration of the Holy Eucharist, where the consecrated elements, bread (“eaten”) and wine (“drunk”), are clearly separated by the centered, unfamiliar element (“divided”), at the same time implying God’s own lack of unity. While communicants are conventionally to enjoy the unity with Christ, the Saviour’s body and blood in Eliot’s poem is thus not shared, but “divided” among conspiracy-like “whispers” and automaton-like gestures of various disconnected figures who participate in this “ghostly parody of the sacrament” without belief, reflecting the fragmentation of their own God.5 The “divided” image of the Eucharist is juxtaposed with a peculiar unity in “Us he devours,” where the order of the pronouns is markedly reversed.6 On the surface, the tiger that “springs in the new year” (l. 48) devours rather than being devoured.7 By “Us” the lyrical “I” may denote only “I an old man” (l. 15) and “you” which appears in Gerontion’s recurring imperative “Think” and “Think at last” (l. 33, 36, 43, 48, 50) and which may be, as David Ward notes, “yet himself ”8 or a woman Gerontion seems to speak to in stanza five.9 The blurring gender of “us” may suggest the meaning of the pronominal https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2046537","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46746378","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}