YALE REVIEWPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tyr.2023.a908682
Sanjena Sathian
{"title":"The Choice Plot: Why are so many novels reckoning with whether to have children?","authors":"Sanjena Sathian","doi":"10.1353/tyr.2023.a908682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a908682","url":null,"abstract":"The Choice PlotWhy are so many novels reckoning with whether to have children? Sanjena Sathian (bio) Imagined children loom over my life of late. They haunt nearly every conversation as my circle collectively wonders whether, when, and how to procreate. There is the friend weighing climate pessimism and a meager paycheck against his love of kids. The friend who watches graphic birthing videos as a form of contraception. The doctor friend, once eager for babies, who sees ectopic pregnancies and septic miscarriages and deems [End Page 132] gestation too risky after Dobbs. The friend who worries he won't be able to adopt as an unpartnered gay man. The child-free queer friends feeling betrayed by other queers' baby fever. The friend who joins a \"committee,\" complete with Zoom calls and pitch decks, to help a single woman pick a sperm donor. The friend who keeps her abortion secret; it is a season of babies, not terminations. The friend whose miscarriage is so physically excruciating it makes her reconsider \"trying\" again. The friend freezing embryos as truce in a long battle with her husband: he is ready for children now; she may never want them. The friend freezing eggs who absconds to the bathroom at a wedding to administer her hormone shots. Millennials did not invent waffling about reproduction, but we have put our generational spin on a familiar story. Twenty-first-century social norms and fertility technologies let us postpone childbearing; our equivocation is still further protracted because our reproductive years have been marked by recessions and environmental catastrophes, in light of which having kids can seem impossible or immoral. All this is to say nothing of the wild swings in our rights. I began my twenties in an age of procreative optimism, forty years after Roe v. Wade, when commercial egg freezing and gay marriage alike were new. I turned thirty months before the Supreme Court overturned Roe; threatened contraception, fertility treatments, and miscarriage care; and began to erode queer rights. The contemporary American paradox: we live in an age of medically expanded but legally diminished choice. Inevitably, in the United States and beyond, novelists are taking up the dilemmas of twenty-first-century procreation. There has been a slew of recent novels about pregnancy and reproductive choice. Among the newest are Louisa Hall's Reproduction (2023), about a Frankenstein-obsessed novelist's pregnancy, and Ashley Wurzbacher's How to Care for a Human Girl (2023), about two sisters who get pregnant simultaneously. Fiction is particularly suited to addressing the quandaries of choice. Interiority and free indirect discourse allow readers to gain intimacy with characters' ambivalent worldviews, while scene and plot let writers dramatize [End Page 133] multiple perspectives and eschew polemic. An ability to represent paradox may in fact be the novel's greatest ethical power. Of course, these contemporary books have ancestors. \"The novel has","PeriodicalId":43039,"journal":{"name":"YALE REVIEW","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
YALE REVIEWPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tyr.2023.a908673
Alec Pollak
{"title":"Hansberry Offstage: The playwright's lesbian writings","authors":"Alec Pollak","doi":"10.1353/tyr.2023.a908673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a908673","url":null,"abstract":"Hansberry OffstageThe playwright's lesbian writings Alec Pollak (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution David Attie, contact sheets of Lorraine Hansberry portrait session, 1959. David Attie/Archive Photos via Getty Images. [End Page 60] With each passing year, Lorraine Hansberry rests more comfortably on her laurels. She is secure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literary greats, unequivocally a foremother of Black American drama. This has not always been the case: Hansberry died young, a one-hit wonder and widely misunderstood. A Raisin in the Sun, her 1959 play about a Black American family's struggle against housing segregation, made her the first Broadway-produced Black woman playwright and the youngest-ever winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Hansberry's politics may have been far-left, but audiences [End Page 61] understood Raisin as a liberal paean to assimilation. As Black art and politics took an increasingly militant turn in the years after Hansberry's death, her popularity waned. Thanks to the tireless work of her literary estate—headed in its early years by her ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff—Hansberry never slipped entirely out of print or public consciousness, but her afterlife has been full of false starts. Critics, eager to explain away a young Black woman who challenged the limits of their understanding, have been quick to write off Hansberry's oeuvre beyond Raisin as \"the poor remnants of an unfinished life.\" As a result, Hansberry's life and influence have come in and out of focus since her death in 1965: she has been rediscovered each decade, celebrated, and then sidelined anew. Today, we are in the midst of a Hansberry renaissance that one hopes will be her last. Since 2014, three biographies, two documentaries, and a half-dozen exhibitions, commemorative works, and awards-nominated theater revivals have recovered what Soyica Diggs Colbert has called Hansberry's \"radical vision\" as an enduring source of wisdom for the present. For the first time, Hansberry's sexuality has emerged as a meaningful component of her identity, one that demands consideration in any account of her life and work. The timing isn't a coincidence: in 2014, the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust avowed publicly that Hansberry was a lesbian and greenlit an unprecedented number of projects. Since then, ten years of commemorative works have reinvented Hansberry as a prophet of feminism, postcolonialism, LGBTQ rights, and Black nationalism who lived an extraordinarily full life, despite her untimely death. With unprecedented access to Hansberry's archive and an engaged, obliging literary estate, the story of Hansberry's multidimensional life seems finally within reach. But the work of understanding her life is far from over. Recent biographers have acknowledged Hansberry's lesbianism, but they have not plumbed the depths of her queer archive or reckoned with her sexuality on Hansberry's own terms: as the \"great personal contradiction\"","PeriodicalId":43039,"journal":{"name":"YALE REVIEW","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
YALE REVIEWPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tyr.2023.a908684
Maggie Doherty
{"title":"More than Magazines: Ms., Sassy , and fifty years of feminism","authors":"Maggie Doherty","doi":"10.1353/tyr.2023.a908684","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a908684","url":null,"abstract":"More than MagazinesMs., Sassy, and fifty years of feminism Maggie Doherty (bio) Nearly all resolutions start with a meeting. When a group of female journalists gathered at Gloria Steinem's uptown Manhattan apartment in the winter of 1971, they were facing a common problem: none of them could get \"real stories about women published.\" The male editors of the major women's magazines—called the \"seven sisters,\" like the colleges—would not accept pitches that did anything other than advise readers to be better, happier, more productive housewives and mothers. General-interest publications, also edited by men, were no better: according to Steinem, her editor at The New York Times Sunday Magazine rejected all her pitches for political stories, saying \"something like, [End Page 158] 'I don't think of you that way.'\" Fed up and fired up, the journalists decided to start their own publication. But what kind of publication would they create, and for what kind of reader? Steinem proposed a newsletter, the kind of low-budget, low-circulation flyer that many feminist groups in New York City favored. But the lawyer and activist Brenda Feigen suggested something different: \"We should do a slick magazine,\" something colorful and glossy that could be sold on newsstands nationwide. Not everyone was keen on the idea. As Vivian Gornick recalled forty years later, \"Radical feminists like me, Ellen Willis, and Jill Johnston...had a different kind of magazine in mind,\" one that might argue against the institutions of marriage and motherhood. When it became clear that Steinem and others \"wanted a glossy that would appeal to the women who read the Ladies' Home Journal,\" Gornick and her radical sisters bowed out. But others hoped that a glossy magazine might strengthen the feminist movement. Letty Cottin Pogrebin thought a slick magazine could be \"a stealth strategy to 'normalize' or 'mainstream' our message.\" As a riposte to The New York Times, which until 1986 refused to refer to a woman by anything other than \"Mrs.\" or \"Miss,\" they decided to call their magazine Ms. The project was ambitious, quixotic, and, historically speaking, unusual. If the newsletter was the preferred form for revolutionary feminist publishing in the late 1960s, the glossy magazine was the form of the prevailing social order. While the radical feminist group Redstockings distributed newsletters and working papers—\"mimeographed thunderbolts,\" they called them—at its consciousnessraising meetings, Ladies' Home Journal was publishing a regular advice column—\"Can This Marriage Be Saved?\"—in which male editors advised unhappy women, some of whom were stuck in abusive relationships, on how to be better wives. (On March 18, 1970, more than a hundred women staged an eleven-hour sit-in at the Ladies' Home Journal offices, protesting the advice column, the \"exploitative\" advertisements, the magazine's all-male editorial team, and the lack of childcare for female staffers.) Newsletters [End Page 159] could b","PeriodicalId":43039,"journal":{"name":"YALE REVIEW","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135641263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
YALE REVIEWPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tyr.2023.a908683
Emily Greenwood
{"title":"How Homer Sounds Now: Emily Wilson's new translation of the Iliad","authors":"Emily Greenwood","doi":"10.1353/tyr.2023.a908683","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a908683","url":null,"abstract":"How Homer Sounds NowEmily Wilson's new translation of the Iliad Emily Greenwood (bio) Every day, the news reminds us of our collective failure as knowers. From history and literature, we have learned over and over that war has a boomerang effect that destroys everything. Yet here we are again: in Ukraine, in Tigray, in Syria. As the scholar-poet-playwright-translator Anne Carson has written, extrapolating from the Iliad, \"In war, things go wrong…YOU LOSE YOU WIN YOU WIN YOU LOSE.\" Carson weaves that pithy lesson into her 2019 play Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, an adaptation of Euripides' Helen. In ancient Greek literature, reflections on the inexorable reciprocity of warfare almost always lead back to the myth of the Trojan War and the Iliad, so there is a lot at stake [End Page 146] in the translation of this poem. As Emily Wilson puts it in a note on her new translation of the epic, \"There is nothing like The Iliad.\" It has been eight years since the appearance of the last major verse translation of the Iliad in English (Caroline Alexander's, in 2015). But the landscape of Homer in English includes more than translations: since the turn of the twentieth century, stunning adaptations of the Iliad have shifted the horizons not only of what the poem can mean in English but also how it feels and sounds. These adaptations include the final installments of the poet Christopher Logue's 1962–2005 project War Music, Elizabeth Cook's prose poem Achilles (2001), David Malouf's novel Ransom (2009), Alice Oswald's poem Memorial (2011), Madeline Miller's novel The Song of Achilles (2011), Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare's play An Iliad (2013), and Michael Hughes's novel Country (2018). And the Trojan War has also been revisited in adaptations of Greek tragedies (such as Carson's reworking of Euripides' Helen). Like Wilson's widely acclaimed 2017 translation of the Odyssey, her Iliad is a Norton edition aimed in large part at the high school and college textbook market. Translating for this target group limits the textual freedom that a creative adaptation allows. But any translator aiming for their finished product to be a work of literature in its own right cannot afford to ignore these recent adaptations, which have given the Iliad such aliveness. Wilson, who is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, steers her craft by the fathoms of Homeric scholarship and the constellations of literatures in English, and the result—the fruit of six years of work—is impressive. Most important in a contemporary translation of Homer's Iliad is its ability to compel readers to read on, all the way through, line by line, attentively and with feeling. Many English Iliads fail this test. Some mangle Homer through \"a mistaken ambition for exactness\" (Donald Carne-Ross's withering criticism of Richmond Lattimore's Homer translations), losing readers' attention for whole sections of the poem. Others previously passed this test, but now the language is no ","PeriodicalId":43039,"journal":{"name":"YALE REVIEW","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
YALE REVIEWPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/tyr.2023.a908677
Heo Su-Gyeong
{"title":"Timehill, and: A Long Time Ago Some King Died","authors":"Heo Su-Gyeong","doi":"10.1353/tyr.2023.a908677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a908677","url":null,"abstract":"Timehill, and: A Long Time Ago Some King Died Heo Su-Gyeong (bio) Translated by Soje (bio) The following two poems first appeared in Time of Bronze, Time of Potatoes (2005), an antiwar poetry collection by South Korean writer, translator, and archaeologist Heo Su-gyeong. Heo was politicized in college by the pro-democratic protests against South Korea's violent, repressive military dictatorship throughout the 1980s. Her poetry, which reckons with the historical roots of that violence, earned her a reputation as one of the leading poets of her generation, alongside Kim Hyesoon and Choi Seungja. Heo moved to Germany in 1992, where she received a doctorate in Near Eastern Studies and resided until her death in 2018. At the time the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Heo was excavating the ruins of the city of Babylon. —soje [End Page 104] Timehill Six in the morning in August AD 2002 We cut the earth into squares with shovels Here come shards of earthenware and pig bones and goat bones and a dog made of mud and a wheel and finally a corner of a trampled floor from circa 2000 BC We pause the dig and begin cleaning How much of that floor is left, two meters by one meter? We measure its height and bearing and draw the remains on graph paper Two meters by one meter of circa 2000 BC Once we're done taking photos we dig again with shovels Let's go about thirty centimeters deeper Again shards of earthenware and pig bones and cow bones and mud dog and wheel and now even grains hardened like rocks A collapsed stone wall from circa 2100 BC The wall's twenty centimeters tall We go lower lower and dig another meter By sifting the dirt we salvage everything including the earthenware shards In only a meter I've dug up about five hundred years and I'm standing in 2500 BC While Abdullah steps away for breakfast I open a can of tuna If someone finds this tuna can about five hundred years from now how will they sort the order of this tangled time How will they decipher this timehill [End Page 105] A Long Time Ago Some King Died, Inside a house made of mud brick I drink tea, a golden tea brought by men who cross the border at night, a long time ago some king died, the men say, but where could that king's tomb be, we've been going around looking for that tomb for a very long time, the men say, once I find the tomb, once I find the golden tomb that shines like tea-light, once I find the dead king … why my wife disappeared back then, why my house was set on fire back then, why horses trampled on my children back then.… A long time ago some king died, he died long long before these men were born, but their eyes all glint with determination, once I find the tomb, I can find out where my family died.… The king died long long before the grandfathers of these men were born, why are the men trying to find the king's tomb, I drink tea, inside a house made of mud brick I drink tea, why did the king die long before the great-grandfathers of these men were even born? [End Page 10","PeriodicalId":43039,"journal":{"name":"YALE REVIEW","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135640101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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