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{"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":"80 1","pages":"37 - 39"},"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":"80 1","pages":"10 - 13"},"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}

{"title":"Imagining Eternity in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Late Poetry","authors":"T. Butler","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2040408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2040408","url":null,"abstract":"Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry is notable for, among other things, its range of modes and moods over the course of Hopkins’s relatively short life. His famous sonnets of 1877 rapturously celebrate the presence of God in the natural world. As he noted in his journal earlier in the 1870s, after coming upon wildflowers in a field: “I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it” (JP 199). But by the time Hopkins moved to Dublin in 1884, where he remained for the last five years of his life, his ability to discover God in the world around him had largely dried up. In one despairing letter to Robert Bridges from 1888, he wrote, “All impulse fails me: I can give myself no sufficient reason for going on. Nothing comes: I am a eunuch–but it is for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” (LRB 270). As stark as this change in disposition is, Hopkins’s late work, written in what he called the “winter world” of Dublin, shows signs of a persistent attentiveness to the varieties of distinctiveness in both language and life. To demonstrate this claim, I’ll examine two difficult poems from the 1880s that conspicuously turn their focus from the natural world: One envisions hell, “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” (1886), and one envisions heaven, “That Nature is a Heraclitian Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” (1888). In “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” night has arrived and blots out all of the earth’s vitality and variety. Everything, according to the poem’s imagery, is culled into one of two spools aligned with the two “folds” of sheep and goats from the Gospel of Matthew’s account of Judgment Day. Humanity, then, is stripped of its celebrated particularity, divided “in two flocks, two folds–black; white │ right, wrong”:","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"80 1","pages":"5 - 9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43939946","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":"Contemplating Stars and Solving Mysteries: Rationality in Mark Haddon’s the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime","authors":"Vincent Bissonette","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2048779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2048779","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The passage discussed in this essay comes from a moment in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time when the protagonist-narrator Christopher’s entire worldview is threatened. He has been trying to solve a mystery of who killed the neighbor’s dog, and he has just learned that his father is the killer and that his mother, whom he thought dead (because that’s what his father told him), is living in London with her lover. As Christopher looks at the stars, he explains to the reader why this is a good way to cope with “difficult things” in life. Through a close reading of the passage, I show how Christopher positions rationality in order to discuss disorder and violence, while insulating himself from it. I go on to argue that his use of the whodunit as his genre of choice serves a similar purpose. In both cases, however, the novel shows the limitations of rationality. It may be a helpful coping mechanism, but personal growth requires engaging in the emotional complexity and human messiness.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"80 1","pages":"19 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43810041","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":"Surprised by Sin: Medical Metaphors and Secular Eschatology in Ian McEwan’s Saturday","authors":"Samik Malla","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2048781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2048781","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Critics have tended to read Saturday through the lens of rationalism, or its failings thereof. This article suggests, perhaps counter-intuitively, that it may be read as an allegory of theological yearning in a world bereft of magic. It is not to cast aspersions on McEwan’s commitment to reason, but to make a case that deep-rooted religious impulses adapt to the dictums of secular materiality and that, instead of abandoning metaphysics, Saturday secularizes it.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"80 1","pages":"29 - 32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41472711","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":"Mirabai and the Ethic of Universal Suffering: Reading Bhajans in Indian Pedagogy","authors":"Ritu Varghese, A. Rath","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2048780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2048780","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The sixteenth-century bhakti poet-saint Mirabai is a household name in Indian literary and cultural tradition. Mira bhajans were once read as one belonging to the corpus of bhakti literature, but the radical character of her legend and bhajans has availed her a recognition that transgresses boundaries of time, space and culture. M.K. Gandhi is said to have revived Mira during the Indian freedom struggle movement, ascribing to her qualities that fit precisely into what was needed to become an ideal, ‘sacred’ and all-enduring woman/icon, during the process of which the hybrid-Mira thus constructed requires a critical reading. This note focuses on a popular Mira bhajan, “Hari tum haro jan ki bhir,” with multiple translations, and addresses the dynamic mechanism of such praxis prevalent in Indian pedagogy which is greatly influenced by the (problematic) historical reading of Mira bhajans which continues till date. The note also explores how such (mis)interpretations could influence the socio-political milieu of an age and propel a misrepresented pedagogy of bhakti literature.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"80 1","pages":"24 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48934786","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 Face of the Other in Home","authors":"Jun Hu","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2048778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2048778","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay investigates Toni Morrison’s novel Home (2012) by focusing on the link between Frank Money, a battered African American veteran of the Korean War, and the young Korean girl he kills at the battlefield. Critics have not paid enough attention to the ethical appeal from the Korean girl to Frank. This essay argues that she plays a very important role in the recovery and growth of Frank, who has been haunted by her smiling face before her death. By drawing on the theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler about the ethical demand made by the other, this essay aims to explore what lies in the vulnerable face of the Korean girl and what prevents Frank initially from responding to her ethically. The essay claims that the transformation of Frank depends not only on his ability to confront his crime of killing the Korean girl, but also to realize and respond to the ethical appeal from her, and finally in mourning the Korean girl, Frank allies with her in the shared vulnerability of all the others in the society.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"80 1","pages":"14 - 18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46771994","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 Parody of Holy Communion in John Donne’s TWICKENHAM GARDEN","authors":"Jie-ae Yu","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2022.2031845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2031845","url":null,"abstract":"Regarding John Donne’s use of parody in his poem “Twickenham Garden,”1 James Baumlin and Jesse Sharpe mention his mock Eucharist (Baumlin 174, and Sharpe 234). Baumlin describes Donne’s embodiment of “the language and liturgical practices” of “the Roman Mass” as “a communion in bitterness and sorrow” (174). Sharpe expands on Baumlin’s brief comment by claiming that “the sacrament of Communion is found to be a curse when used by Donne” (234). Sharpe concludes that “the poet is able to both destroy paradise and pervert its salvation” (234), and so “he is an anti-Christ” (234). However, I contend that Donne does not take such a bleak view of the sacrament. His witty inversion of Holy Communion is far more nuanced than these commentators suggest, since it reflects the speaker’s paradoxical perceptions of selfhood, suffering, love, and truth. I argue that Donne’s mock Eucharist identifies the speaker as a true sufferer and pilgrim seeking the path to salvation. “Twickenham Garden” commences with the speaker’s visit to that garden, but his introspective reaction to the physical surroundings transfigures it into an internal battlefield of mental and spiritual turmoil. In “You Have Refined Me,” a verse epistle to the Countess of Bedford composed in the same period as “Twickenham Garden” (ca. 1608-10), Donne describes visiting the garden as a “pilgrimage” (l. 43). The destination of the journey is the country home of Donne’s patroness, Lady Bedford, who “leased Twickenham Park in succession to Francis Bacon from 1607 to 1618” (Robbins 253). Donne adapts the concept of “pilgrimage” to a metaphorical voyage into the speaker’s inner world where he anticipates securing peace and freedom from the great anguish of unrequited love. As Claire Eager mentions, the garden within the park “is not merely a pleasant place, but a vision of ‘Paradise’ itself ” (532). The speaker comes to the garden of “true Paradise” (l. 9) where he desires “to seek spring/ And at mine eyes, and at mine ears,/Receive such balms, as else cure https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2031845","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"80 1","pages":"1 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41682312","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":"If As I Lay Dying is a mock-epic, what is being mocked?","authors":"P. Hays","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.2005524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005524","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47281424","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":"Beowulf and Freawaru","authors":"Leonard Neidorf","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.2005523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005523","url":null,"abstract":"The critical fortunes of Beowulf ’s homecoming speech, the lengthy speech in which the returned hero narrates his Danish adventure before the Geatish court (ll. 2000–2151, 2155–2162), changed considerably over the course of the twentieth century. Though once regarded as a crude summary reflecting composite authorship or serial performance, the speech is now recognized as a sophisticated rhetorical performance through which the hero proclaims his fitness to rule Geatland.1 One passage in the speech that has recently garnered insightful commentary concerns the hero’s interaction, or lack thereof, with the Danish princess Freawaru, the daughter of Hrothgar, during his time at Heorot. Beowulf says:","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"182 - 187"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58962980","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}