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{"title":"From the Penile to the Pinnal: Anatomizing Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea","authors":"D. McKay","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1951642","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1951642","url":null,"abstract":"Although last year’s republication of Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea as part of University of Washington Press’ Classics of Asian American Literature series might seem to grant Chu’s novel canonical status, the book’s history reveals this moment as only the most recent accession. Upon publication in 1961, reviewers looked askance at a narrative containing characters who gambled, swore, whored, and chain-smoked their way through life, aspects that would later commend the text, as symptoms if not in themselves, to those cultural nationalists of the 1970s who saw in Chu an ‘authentic’ Asian American writer (Chin, et al. xxxi). By and large, the approval underpinning their reading, in which Chu’s transliterations of Sze Yup idioms were refreshing in their inattentiveness to the cultural and moral sensibilities of white American readers (as were his recuperated – that is, unexotic – depictions of New York City’s Chinatown), remains a central window into the text to this day (S. Wang 70). As against this, Chu’s contentment with underdeveloped female characters and, more dubious still, a social system of unreconstructed patriarchy are features that cannot be passed over without comment (Hsiao 152–153). Whether one positions Chu’s novel as a work of inspired antiracism or recrudescent misogyny, either way a double-layered awareness remains in the mind of the reader: one must heed, that is, the gendered and racial divisions that structure the narrative while also observing the ways in which these same structures have given rise to readings that are themselves ideologically divided. A critical model that might transcend this bifurcation has proven elusive, though its absence has not retarded the development of insightful scholarship that offers, for example, a reframing of Chu’s depictions of Chinese American masculinities, seeing in them fragmented rather than whole subjectivities (Ling 36); or a (re)reading of fraternity as a lived and/or an imagined experience, envisaging it as a system of equal importance to the family (Hsu 249–250). In what follows, I shall intervene in this wider discussion, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1951642","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"111 - 114"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46442223","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":"Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” and the Legacy of Lynching","authors":"T. Peyser","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1965520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1965520","url":null,"abstract":"Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” is her longest short story, but it stands out in other ways. For one thing, it bumps up against the legal framework of Jim Crow—in the form of anti-miscegenation laws—that generally goes unmentioned in her writing. Moreover, the fact that the story contains possibly the most frank outburst of racial animus in her works—the proper Mrs. McIntyre’s denunciation of her employee Sulk as “a half-witted thieving black stinking nigger” (222)—suggests that the mounting crisis in race relations came closer to emerging as a central focus here than elsewhere in the 1950s writings of an author who famously declared that in fiction “the topical is poison” (The Habit of Being, 537). The title character himself may point to the prominence of race in the story, for although he is Polish, and thus as a legal and social matter counts unambiguously as white, critics have noted the “racial ‘inbetween-ness’” of his “apparently miscegenated body” (Taylor 71, 78), which “seems strangely uncategorizable” (O’Gorman 36). A close reading, in fact, suggests that O’Connor uses the other characters’ complicity in the refugee’s death as a way to approach a topic she did not represent directly anywhere in her fiction: the violence and threat of violence used by Southern whites to retain their supremacy. That the Polish Mr. Guizac ultimately becomes a surrogate for Blackness may seem surprising, since in some respects other than color he differs from and is even antagonistic toward the Black hands already present on Mrs. McIntyre’s dairy farm, Astor and Sulk. His somewhat ferocious diligence and efficiency contrast with their apparently less energetic application, along with that of the whites employed on the farm, Mr. and Mrs. Shortley. The prospect of more of Mr. Guizac’s kind swarming over the Atlantic to drive out lowwage workers even prompts Mrs. Shortley to predict, “The time is going to come...when there won’t be no more occasion to speak” of a Black person (206). As for Mr. Guizac himself, “The Negroes made him nervous” (202). https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1965520","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"141 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48042870","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":"Maggie’s death and Dorothea’s growth — the sublimation of passion in George Eliot’s novels","authors":"Xiaotong Guo","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1960471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1960471","url":null,"abstract":"Passion has been regarded as one of the shared characteristics of George Eliot’s heroines, but even though it has been heatedly discussed, the implications of passion have not been clearly defined. For instance, John Ruskin once criticizes Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss for her “ungoverned excess of any appetite or passion” (467), and passion here can be understood as powerful feelings. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, comments that these heroines “each has the deep feminine passion for goodness”, but they could not “find what they seek” no matter how hard they tried (482). Passion here surely indicates more than feelings. Gillian Beer argues that passions in George Eliot’s novels cannot be regarded as solely heterosexual affairs, but “vehement human need sustained past the accomplishment of the moment of desire” (86). In fact, I think it is exactly this vehement human need that vitalizes George Eliot’s heroines, and powerful feelings are its most obvious representation. Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss and Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch are both equipped with a passionate impulse, but their fates are totally different. George Eliot never gives Maggie the chance to mature. Instead, she only lets her die to evade the struggle between passion and duty, the inherent problem among all of George Eliot’s heroines. Dorothea, however, gains her intellectual and moral growth and sublimates her passion into sympathy. I believe Spinoza’s teaching on passion can shed new light on this issue, but even though Spinoza’s influence on George Eliot has been widely recognized, his particular idea of passion has not been closely examined within George Eliot’s writings. This essay tries to make a little contribution to fill this gap by excavating how George Eliot sublimates passion in the narrative of her heroines’ growths, and how their growths correspond to Spinoza’s idea of passion. https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1960471","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"115 - 118"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44126282","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":"Carnivalesque Imagery in Stevens’ “THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM”","authors":"Weina Fan","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1965521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1965521","url":null,"abstract":"In a letter to William Rose Benet in 1933, Wallace Stevens explained the reason why he considered “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” his personal favorite in Harmonium (1923) because the poem “wears a deliberately commonplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry” (Letters 263). Stevens’ explanation concerns both the realistic touch and esthetic accomplishment of the poem. Noticeably, the word “gaudy” refers to a celebratory festival or feast. Coincidentally, this poem is teeming with carnivalesque imagery that seeks to cultivate, in Bakhtin’s words, “a deeper understanding of reality” (208), and, not surprisingly, Stevens also noted that “the consciousness of reality” was crucial to the understanding of this poem (Letters 500). A keen sense of reality features strikingly in Bakhtin’s carnivalesque theory and Stevens’ perception of the poem, which enables a carnivalesque reading of the poem to be an interesting way of exploring Stevens’ ideas concerning the reality of being. In the first stanza, the poet presents a typical party scene that can be considered a modern carnival. Stevens had “penchants for indulgence in food, drink, and cigars” (Bloom 16), and naturally the things he enjoyed enormously in life were consciously chosen as significant party imagery as follows:","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"145 - 149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48746899","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":"Wallace Stevens’s “The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain”","authors":"Glen MacLeod","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1965518","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1965518","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"131 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41522994","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 Post-pastoral Reading of Ron Rash’s “Speckled Trout”","authors":"Robert Fillman","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1965519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1965519","url":null,"abstract":"Although popularly known for his novels The World Made Straight (2006) and Serena (2008), Ron Rash has also committed himself to an unapologetic portrayal of the rural history and shifting cultures of Southern Appalachia through his poetry. His poems map the dramatic transformation of an agrarian landscape in the wake of industrial and post-industrial development. His first volume, Eureka Mill (1998), charts the Appalachian outmigration of the early twentieth century, honoring the experience of displacement and impoverishment as farmers reluctantly abandoned their roots in the mountain soil to seek work in the exploitative textile mills of Chester County, South Carolina. His second and third volumes, Among the Believers (2000) and Raising the Dead (2002), extend Rash’s engagement with the passing of an agricultural-based livelihood that had sustained individual families and a region for generations. In Among the Believers, the natural world embodies a religious experience in the Emersonian sense, nature figured as a divine language, “graced with a cadence so pure/ears deaf a lifetime now heard.”1 In the more elegiac Raising the Dead, the poet combats cultural erasure, shifting his attention to the 1973 flooding of Jocassee Valley by Duke Power Company— unearthing the stories, customs, and myths of the displaced townsfolk whose ancestral farms, churches, and gravesites were submerged beneath the manmade body of water (Lake Jocassee). In every volume to date, including his most recent collection, Waking (2011), which is his most personal, Rash expresses a sense of attachment to and rootedness in the rural landscape, while detailing its material and social transformation. Indeed, an intimacy with more-than-human-nature is arguably what structures Rash’s entire poetic corpus. British ecocritic Terry Gifford has spent decades conceptualizing the “post-pastoral,” which places environmental concerns at the center, not the periphery, of the pastoral tradition. Gifford asserts that the “post-pastoral” does not https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1965519","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"135 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47969928","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":"“Monsters Worse to Come”: A Reconsideration of the Influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Upon Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God","authors":"Russell M. Hillier","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1951641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1951641","url":null,"abstract":"In a 2008 essay, Ashley Craig Lancaster has demonstrated the principal parallels and divergences between Mary Shelley’s Gothic masterpiece Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (using the 1818 edition) and Cormac McCarthy’s Southern Gothic novel Child of God (1973) in their complementary representations of Shelley’s Monster and McCarthy’s voyeur, necrophile, and murderer Lester Ballard.1 Lancaster proposes that “McCarthy combines the tradition of British Gothicism with the realism of American Gothicism to create an updated version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (132). According to Lancaster, Shelley and McCarthy’s anti-heroes are rejected by human community, denied companionship, and subjected to a “system of social othering” (133). Ultimately, “Lester becom[es] exactly what the townspeople have always thought of him as, a dangerously degenerate man” (142). Lancaster’s persuasive thesis accords with other interpretations of Child of God which maintain that “the novel seems designed ... to build sympathy for Ballard” (Lang 93; see Ellis 69–112). Notwithstanding, Lancaster overlooks several episodes that not only show the direct influence of Shelley’s work upon McCarthy’s third Appalachian novel, but also indicate McCarthy’s ambitious purpose to draw the reader into imaginative sympathy for Ballard’s plight as Shelley did for her Monster. Two passages McCarthy adapts from Shelley’s Frankenstein intimate Ballard’s moral imagination and his latent capacity for goodness and reformation. In the first passage, Shelley’s Monster delivers an extensive history of his early life to his creator Victor Frankenstein in which he recounts how he placed all his hopes upon being welcomed and socially accepted by a family of cottagers. On beholding the Monster, however, the cottagers are horrified, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1951641","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"104 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43007347","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":"On the cyclical movement in John Keats’s “to autumn”","authors":"Ying Duan","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1965515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1965515","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Keats’s “To Autumn,” a short poem dedicated to the season of autumn, implicitly exhibits the cyclical movement of one day and four seasons, manifesting Northrop Frye’s definition of “process of life.” As the speaker’s focus shifts from autumnal fruitfulness to autumnal labor and to autumnal sound, there is also an implicit progression from morning to afternoon and into dusk. Parallel to the diurnal cycle within the poem, there is a transition from early autumn to mid-autumn and then to the heralding of winter. The cycles of one day and four seasons epitomize the single great circle of life in general.","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"119 - 122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44681581","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":"Rappaccini’s Queer Daughter: Gender Non-Conformity in “Rappaccini’s Daughter”","authors":"Jonahs Kneitly","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1920358","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1920358","url":null,"abstract":"Giovanni’s and Beatrice’s journeys begin and end with Rappaccini and his garden where, among his cultivated flora, they find sexuality and dangerous gender non-conformity. Andrew Owens posits sexuality as the fearsome gothic beast with queer sexuality being especially uncanny as it is non-procreative (35). Gothic literature depicts sexuality which defies binary, heteronormative efforts and moves non-conformist gender roles into mainstream consciousness (33). Though Owens is speaking of contemporary gothic fiction, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” evokes similar ideas as it is the convergence of queer sexuality and the changing sexual norms of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s time. Within “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” a subtext of gender fluidity and heteronormative reaction against ambiguous sexuality and non-procreative sex are identifiable. The inclusion of gender non-conformity and reversal is somewhat common in Hawthorne’s stories and has been identified in previous examinations of his work. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” contains a fairy tale theme that Hawthorne often incorporated in his tales. Nina Baym posits Hawthorne’s stories as gender reversed tales of Sleeping Beauty. Baym notes:","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"97 - 100"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00144940.2021.1920358","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41744191","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":"Samuel Beckett, Max Nordau, and the Worms of How It Is","authors":"Rick de Villiers","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2021.1937474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1937474","url":null,"abstract":"“One louse meets another louse,” Beckett jests in a letter to a friend (Letters 3 347). “The first says: ‘Anything wrong?’ The second: ‘I’m feeling man-y’.” Whether lepidopteran, chironomid, or other, worms in Beckett are emblematic of indeterminacy, of being less-than-fully human. Nowhere is this clearer than in How It Is (Comment C’est), a text populated by creatures whose condition is very literally touched by Beckett’s preoccupation with the “eternally larval” (Letters 2 103). In his “Pim” notebook, Beckett twice jotted down “être un ver quelle force” (“to be a worm, what strength”), a phrase lifted from Victor Hugo’s L’Homme qui Rit (Comment 200). Among possible titles for the novel, Beckett toyed with using “Cher fruit cher [ver]”—a phrase of Blakean feel that made it into the body of the text as “Dear bud dear worm” (How 69). In the published version, however, the most explicit intimation of Bom’s worm-like existence is provided by the image of a self-dividing slime-worm. Bom likens the movement between torturers and victims to the “migration of slime-worms ... or [a] tailed latrinal scissiparous frenzy” (How 98). The French gives “vers de vase” (Comment 144)—a type of insect belonging to the order chironomidae, whose larvae are often found in sewage (see Armitage et al. 132). Like caterpillars, slime-worms eventually transform into a winged insect; unlike butterflies, however, the winged insect is habitually parasitized. Within a context where the suffering of one creature sustains another, such metamorphosis seems apt. But there is no suggestion that this change occurs, thus implying a failure of becoming. Beckett may have encountered “scissiparous” in Georges Bataille’s Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo (1957), where the word is used in its scientific sense to indicate the splitting of a single organism into two: “Let us call the original cell a, the two cells it turns into aa and aaa” (95). In Beckett’s novel, such bifurcation is dramatized on a small-scale https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1937474","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"79 1","pages":"101 - 103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00144940.2021.1937474","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48130132","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}