EXPLICATOR最新文献

{"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":"A Window on One’s Identity: Cultural Identity In Chinua Achebe’s “The Sacrificial Egg”","authors":"Hawk Chang","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.2005514","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005514","url":null,"abstract":"As a Nigerian writer of fiction in English, Chinua Achebe is well known for articulating an African identity that is distinguishable from colonizers’ constructions, partly because relevant studies have historically been dominated by white voices and have muffled or excluded those of local people (Daniels 68). According to Philip Whyte, “Achebe’s explicitly pedagogical aim was to provide a narrative of African (more specifically Igbo) history from the inside to counter the representation previously monopolized by Western outsiders” (12). Robert L. Ross argues that Achebe’s writing often chronicles “Nigeria’s experience with colonialism” through “an African viewpoint” (23). However, it is an oversimplification to assert that Achebe is blind to some positive aspects of colonial legacies, as political science scholar Bruce Gilley contended in his analysis of Achebe’s prose work There Was a Country: A Profound History of Biafra (646–47). Overall, Achebe is a pragmatist who is committed to reinvigorating the indigenous culture in the colonial context, simultaneously maintaining awareness of the complicated legacy of colonization. A distinct emphasis on the indigenous identity is evidenced in Achebe’s works Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), and Arrow of God (1964), which Achebe critics such as Neena Gandhi (60–62) and Simon Gikandi (31–34) have highlighted. Similar expression of a curiously African identity is evident in Achebe’s short story “The Sacrificial Egg” (1962), which tells of the transformation of Umuru from an idyllic village to a commercial port under the influence of colonization. Achebe’s criticism of colonialism is clear in many of his works, and the co-existence of local and Western ways of life in this particular story does not promote the integration of different cultural values. Rather, this short piece features Julius Obi, the male protagonist, and his spiritual journey as he transitions from a self-important, well-educated elitist who despises his own culture to a man of humility who pays great respect to African traditions and cultural values. This echoes Alassane Abdoulaye Dia’s argument that, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005514","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46145113","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 “Clearances: ‘III’”","authors":"R. Russell","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.2005520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005520","url":null,"abstract":"Seamus Heaney’s third sonnet from his sequence “Clearances,” collected in his 1987 volume, The Haw Lantern, quickly became a favorite of his readers and indeed, it was voted the favorite Irish poem of the last 100 years by the Irish public in an Irish Times poll from 2015. The poem is characteristic Heaney in its appeal to our senses and many commentators have focused their reading of the poem on its images of potato peeling that the young Heaney undertook with his mother “When all the others were away at Mass” (line 1; all parenthetical references are to the poem in Opened Ground 285). Certain resonances of this domestic activity that brought Heaney and his mother, who died in 1984, so close together remain unexplored in the criticism, however, and are worth retrieving for a better understanding of how he movingly charts their closeness. Heaney employs careful rhymes to signify his intimacy with his mother in both stanzas, along with two images of fluid metal across those stanzas. Sonically, the poet uses the repetition and rhymes of “all” and “fall” in its opening octave to signify how this domestic space and activity was a comfortable space of togetherness for the boy and his mother; moreover, it becomes a substitute, sacred space for that of the Mass that he and his mother—perhaps somewhat scandalously—miss. To wit, “When all the others were away at Mass/I was all hers as we peeled potatoes” (1–2). Heaney cleverly juxtaposes “all the others” attending Catholic mass with being “all hers” as they peeled potatoes. In a family with nine children, Heaney rarely would have been “all hers” because Mary Heaney would have had her attention divided ten ways—among husband and her nine children. Now, in this labor of love, Heaney can bask in her attention, silently lavished upon him, broken only by the potatoes that they “let fall one by one...” (3). The use of “fall” echoes the twice repeated “all” in the first two lines, and this new rhyming verb appears again in line seven to describe once more that potatoes that they “let fall” (7). Thus, the silent attention Mary Heaney bestowed upon her eldest child is occasionally broken by these “Little pleasant splashes...” (7). https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005520","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46024404","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":null,"pages":null},"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}