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{"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":"79 1","pages":"151 - 154"},"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":"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}

{"title":"The romance of Tristan and Isolde in Kristin Lavransdatter","authors":"S. Barnes","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.2005522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005522","url":null,"abstract":"During the ongoing centennial of Kristin Lavransdatter’s publication (The Wreath in 1920; The Wife, 1921; The Cross, 1922), a new generation of readers is discovering Sigrid Undset’s trilogy. Notoriously difficult to interpret, its complexities can tax even a seasoned reader to the breaking point. If, however, good imaginative writing “is ideally as ambiguous and opaque as life itself,” intentionally absent of any “swiftly expressible message,” as John Updike once described it (29), then Kristin Lavransdatter is an exemplary work. For instance, how should readers think about the story’s protagonist? Kristin is self-sacrificing and vengeful, pious and self-pitying, unforgiving and generous. Her childhood at Jørundgaard and her dotage at Rein Convent could be viewed as mere bookends, unsatisfying authorial “gestures,” bracketing what is otherwise a lifetime of struggle, marked more by moral failure than by triumph. Similarly, how should readers understand Erlend Nikulaussøn, Kristin’s husband? At one moment, he is dashing and courageous; in the next, he is reckless, imprudent, and selfish beyond belief, imperiling everyone he loves for the briefest of pleasures. Quick to overlook others’ wrongdoings, he is equally hasty in forgetting his own, exposing a moral shallowness that clouds his vision, hiding from himself the consequences of his folly. Kristin and Erlend are, of course, only the two most obvious challenges readers must face in Undset’s trilogy. Even so, grappling with such difficulties can be revelatory, and not only of the text, for in struggling with the story, readers can be led to unexplored reaches in their own souls. The stakes, then, of taking up such a work are high, for the consequences of misreading can be two-fold: a misinterpretation of the story cannot easily be separated from a misunderstanding of the self. This interpretive interplay between reader and text is relevant to this essay’s purpose, but only as a secondary concern. Its primary objective is to remain within the narrative, examining the ways that two of its characters engage with other imaginative works. In other words, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005522","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"178 - 181"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43397814","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":"Shakespeare’s Tempest Line 1786: “Wise” or “Wife”","authors":"Mingqiang Li","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.2013149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2013149","url":null,"abstract":"In 1709, Nicholas Rowe emended the last word in line 1786 to “Wife” (1:47), thus starting a heated dispute of more than 300 years over whether this word should be “wise” or “wife”. Jeanne Addison Roberts sets forth very clearly and detailedly and chronologically the editorial history of this word and the different views of editors and scholars from 1709 to 1974 in her 1978 article “‘Wife’ or ‘Wise’—The Tempest l. 1786”. It can be seen in the article that “wife” is preferred by some editors and scholars, “wise” by some others, and a few editors even waver between “wise” and “wife”, adopting “wife” in one edition and then changing it back to “wise” in another, or contrariwise (203–205). After checking all the First Folios in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Roberts discovered two copies (#’s 73 and 6) with “clear examples of ‘wife’” (206) and five copies (#’s 2, 12, 18, 54, and 62) whose “f ’s” show “damage on the right side of the crossbar” (207), and she also found that “among copies in which the letter looks like long ‘s,’ there are at least twelve cases of what appear to be fragments of a broken crossbar on the right side of the letter” (207). Depending on this discovery, she concludes in the same article “that the letter, originally an ‘f,’ was bent or broken in the process of printing, thus transforming the original ‘wife’ to ‘wise’” (207). https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2013149","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"192 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46600359","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":"Silko’s Narrative Negotiation of the Rain Man’s Rites of the Passage","authors":"B.Durga Devi, Divyajyoti Singh","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.2005516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005516","url":null,"abstract":"Leslie Marmon Silko’s story “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” (1974) is an important work of the “the second wave” (Allen 8) of Native American writing. In the story, Silko shows an “understated celebration of death of a beloved Indian grandfather” (Rosen xi). However, the death of the Indian elder becomes a site for reassertion of Indian tradition and culture of the indigeneous people of America. Molly Andrews in her essay ‘Narrating Moments of Political Change’ observes: “As such, stories play a vital role, not only in constructing the political world as it is, but also as it might be, depicting how it once was. These stories are never consensual—it is the mark of humankind to contest the stories of other individuals and communities. But stories are one of the primary vehicles through which politics are articulated and debated.” The question arises whether the story “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” is a political narrative or whether it can be justiciably read in the frame of a text engaged with identity politics? Since narratives are a part of the community, especially narratives that consciously evoke questions of differences in culture the present story becomes an exemplary specimen of investigation into politics of identity and further offers a negotiated alternative to lived experience where ‘exclusion’ or dominance is practised. In ‘The Man to Send Rain Clouds’ the family decides to take a limited dispensation from Christianity—as much as will suit the demands of the community and align with the wishes of the departed individual. Molly Andrews notes, ‘narratives are central to the machination of politics, for in constructing the stories about what is and isn’t working, and how this compares to a notion of ‘how it should be’ we are invariably deciding what aspects of social/political/economic/cultural life are and are not relevant to the current problem and its solution—in other words, the lifeblood of politics. Thus, political narratives engage the imagination, not only in constructing stories about the past and the present, but in helping https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005516","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"160 - 165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45586800","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 Symbolic Fiction of Mr. Stevens: A Lacanian Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day","authors":"Jeremy C. De Chavez","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.2005521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005521","url":null,"abstract":"It is not surprising that Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day has solicited several psychoanalytic readings. The novel’s central character, Mr. Stevens, exhibits symptoms of someone afflicted by an acute form of repression. Critics, cognizant of the compatibility of theory and text, have thus turned to Freudian psychoanalytic concepts to explain Mr. Stevens’s motivations, drawing on the theory’s hydraulic understanding of libidinal energy. Brian Shaffer, for example, has described the novel as “one of the most profound representations of repression masquerading as professionalism” (87). He cites a litany of examples to illustrate Mr. Stevens’s constant evasions of circumstances that will force a confrontation with uncomfortable political and sexual issues, and how his repressed aggression and desires are sublimated into abstract ideals such as dignity and greatness. For Shaffer, the “most striking examples of sexual repression center around the Stevens-Kenton relationship” and he presents an interesting reading of their verbal jousts as betraying sublimated sexual desire. For him, it is clear that Stevens is “self-censoring [and] self-deceptive” (70). Utilizing the same theoretical resources but arriving at a radically different reading of the novel, Ruth Parkin-Gounelas argues that “there is no deception in Stevens’ act. The dictates of the superego do not repress Stevens’ emotions; they have replaced them” (41). For Parkin-Gounelas, Mr. Stevens has completely internalized the superego of both his biological father and his symbolic father, Lord Darlington. This dual introjection leads to the erasure of Mr. Stevens’s own ego. She contends that Mr. Stevens’s biological father stands for the “superego of the father” that he has internalized since childhood. As for Lord Darlington, Mr. Stevens’s substitute father, Parkin-Gounelas claims that he stands for “another kind of superego” (39). She suggests that it is through this manner that “Ishiguro explores the way the imperatives of deference and duty may rage with savage cruelty against the ego” (38). I am convinced that the difference in Shaffer’s and Parkin-Gounelas’s interpretation results from the absence of Mr. Stevens’s case history. Since the Oedipal https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005521","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"174 - 177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48861027","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":"Remnants of the Past and the Quest for Identity: Reading August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson in the Context of Collective Memory","authors":"Lamiaa S. Youssef","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.2005518","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005518","url":null,"abstract":"In our quest to negotiate the present and define our place within the continuum of the human experience, we try to engage with the past, examining relics, searching for roots, and sifting through memories. As members of a group, our engagement is shaped by two representations of the past: history and collective memory. The latter term was introduced by the French philosopher and sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs, in his seminal work On Collective Memory first published in 1950. Collective memory is a conglomeration of individual recollections of past experiences handed down from one generation to another, thus helping in the formation of a group identity that differentiates it from other groups, each with its own collective memory. In that respect, collective memory is different from history, which is a physical representation of past events in the form of accounts, monuments, and artifacts. Whereas neither has a claim to objective representation of the past because both are mere interpretations by their transmitters, collective memory is more dynamic because it is more apt to engage with the present and can undergo gradual transformation based on how the group defines its identity and envisions its future. For African Americans, “It was the memory of slavery and its representation through speech and art works that grounded African American identity” (Eyerman 2). This identity did not take form in the land of origin, where people identified themselves through tribal affiliations, but was defined or rather imposed on them through the experience of slavery and its subsequent reproductions that gave rise to the group’s collective memory. The Charles family in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is a microcosmic representation of that collective memory which binds the different group members together and ultimately saves them from utter loss and despair. The surviving members of that family span three generations reflecting the growing distance from https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005518","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"166 - 170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45995599","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":"“Trick or Treat!”: The Trickster Figure in Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr Rosewater and Slapstick","authors":"Ankit Raj, Nagendra Kumar","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.2005515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005515","url":null,"abstract":"In the framing chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut recounts what he learned in his Anthropology course at the University of Chicago—that people are essentially the same and that nobody is “ridiculous or bad or disgusting” (7). He further confesses that this is the reason he never writes stories with villains (7). Though largely true, his claim seems debatable if one examines two of his characters—Norman Mushari and Norman Mushari Jr.—the two being the objects of study in this article that propounds an alternate understanding of Vonnegut’s assertion. These characters have startling similarities with the archetypal trickster figure of American Indian myths as commented upon by Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung among others.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"155 - 159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58962826","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":"Revisiting the Tortoiseshell Cat: Subjectivity and Discursive Dilemma of the American wife in Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain”","authors":"Jing-Yu Zhang","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1965517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1965517","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"127 - 130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58962759","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":"Marvell’s “the unfortunate lover”","authors":"Alan S. Horn","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1965516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1965516","url":null,"abstract":"“The Unfortunate Lover” (1648–49) by Andrew Marvell has provoked a range of modern interpretations (Berthoff 1966; Patterson 1978; Stocker 1986; Enterline 1987; Klawitter 2009; Hirst and Zwicker 2012), with little consensus on its tone or purpose. Michael Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of literature (1978, 1983) can help to clarify the structure and meaning of this challenging poem, while shedding light on some of the sources of its ambiguity. According to this theory, every poem derives from a sentence, phrase, or single word that need not appear in it directly. It elaborates that minimal starting-point (its “matrix”) by reference to clusters of verbal association already present in the reader’s mind – received ideas, common phrases, well-known passages from other works, literary conventions, and the like – that Riffaterre calls “intertexts.” Applying this thesis to Marvell’s “Unfortunate Lover,” it is possible to show how the poem expands and transforms the phrase fortune in love, which is echoed in the title, through two contrasting generic intertexts: heroic narrative and Petrarchan lyric. The former offers an exemplary representation of fortune itself, the power ruling the individual struggle against contingency, while the latter dramatizes fortune in the special context of love as the fickleness of a lady’s favor. Riffaterre holds that the poem’s initial expansion of its matrix (the “model”) governs the form of successive variants. In the case of “The Unfortunate Lover,” the first stanza constitutes the model – the original extended variant of the phrase fortune in love. The first two couplets repeat and develop the concept of love in the mode of pastoral allegory, while the third, through the conventional simile of a meteor, introduces the idea of fortune as it stereotypically applies to love in the form of passion’s inconstancy. The final couplet, however, raises a concern that seems out of place, prefiguring the clash of generic codes around which the poem is structured. It is not pastoral lovers who are traditionally expected to “make impression upon Time” (8) but the noble hero. https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1965516","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"123 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46227150","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}