{"title":"The Inoperative Community in The Bell Jar: The Sharing of Interrupted Myth","authors":"Maria Luisa Pascual-Garrido","doi":"10.28914/ATLANTIS-2017.39.1.71-90","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28914/ATLANTIS-2017.39.1.71-90","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay I intend to offer an analysis of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963) that goes beyond the scope of the confessional and feminist readings which have prevailed in Plathian studies. Following the critical interest raised by the notion of community and its problematic relationship with individual subjectivity in recent decades, I draw on Jean-Luc Nancy’s understanding of “community” (1985-1986) in order to offer an alternative interpretation of The Bell Jar. The theoretical framework which inspires this essay declares the impossibility of an operative community which actually fulfils the natural longing of all human beings for immanence and transcendence. I argue that The Bell Jar actually tackles the interruption of two long-standing myths—the possibility of community and the assertion of autonomy of the self. Since the latter has already been addressed by several authors as a central issue in Plath’s novel, I here focus on how she deals with the shattered myth of community. Far from being a narcissistic account of private traumas, the novel is paradoxically an attempt to share with others a universal plight—the overwhelming sense of humans as exposed and finite beings facing the absence of a community of immanence. Ironically, it is the sharing of that disturbing truth which allows the emergence of community in Plath’s novel. Key words: Sylvia Plath; The Bell Jar; inoperative community; singularity; finitude; exposure","PeriodicalId":54016,"journal":{"name":"Atlantis-Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83092530","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 Dangerous Love”: Ben Okri’s Persisting Commitment to Literary Experimentation","authors":"Maurice O'Connor","doi":"10.28914/ATLANTIS-2017.39.1.189-204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28914/ATLANTIS-2017.39.1.189-204","url":null,"abstract":"A once high-profile post-colonial writer, it is noticeable that the London-Nigerian novelist and essayist Ben Okri has all but dropped out of view as far as the literary establishment is concerned. While his earlier works still receive much academic attention and are deemed highly influential, critical engagements with his later fiction are almost non-existent. With this in mind, our aim is to map out the many transformations the author’s work has gone through and offer explanations as to the reasons behind certain negative receptions of the author’s work. To understand the new directions the author’s current writings have taken, one must analyse the totality of his novelistic writings as a single collective body striving towards a sustained renovation of the literary form. Our premise is that this experimentation might, contrary to its aim, be hampering the author’s success, and our study shall, therefore, examine in detail the experimental nature of these later works and offer a series of perceptions as to their possible shortcomings. Keywords: Ben Okri; post-colonial writing; literary experimentation; spiritual resource-bases; hybridism; New Ageism","PeriodicalId":54016,"journal":{"name":"Atlantis-Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82015474","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":"Woody Guthrie’s \"Songs Against Franco\"","authors":"Will Kaufman","doi":"10.5420/WGA.0.54-72","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5420/WGA.0.54-72","url":null,"abstract":"In 1952 Woody Guthrie wrote a series of songs condemning the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. These songs were never published or recorded. The present article, based on research at the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is the first study of Guthrie’s anti-Franco writings, situating them in the context of Guthrie’s abiding anti-fascism amidst the repressive political culture of McCarthyism. Guthrie’s Songs Against Franco are also placed within the broader history of the songs of the Spanish Civil War as they were adopted and perpetuated in American leftist circles following the defeat of the Second Spanish Republic. Written coterminously with the onset of Guthrie’s fatal Huntington’s disease, they are the legacy of his final assault on what he perceived to be the transplanting of embryonic fascism into the US, a small but coherent body of work yoking the Spanish past to Guthrie’s American present. Keywords: Woody Guthrie; Spanish Civil War; Franco; folk music; McCarthyism; anti-communism","PeriodicalId":54016,"journal":{"name":"Atlantis-Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84978344","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":"Under the Radar: Jess Walter's The Zero and the State of Irony and Satire after 9/11","authors":"Dolores Resano","doi":"10.28914/ATLANTIS-2017.39.1.133-152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28914/ATLANTIS-2017.39.1.133-152","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores a typically overlooked novel within the corpus of post-9/11 fiction, Jess Walter’s The Zero (2006), and puts forward some hypotheses for this under-examination. The article suggests that the various debates that arose in the aftermath of 9/11—the status of fiction after tragedy, the theses on the demise of irony and satire, the high expectations put on canonical authors to give meaning to the event, and standardized explorations of the figure of the terrorist Other—all served to construct readings for The Zero that fell within prescriptive approaches to post-9/11 fiction and thus missed its highly subversive potential. While recent academic output is starting to explore The Zero in innovative ways, early reception failed to examine it conceptually and formally, favoring as it did a trauma studies approach that resulted in a bland analysis of the novel’s focus on terrorist figures. This article offers a reading of The Zero through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of satirical carnivalization, a practice that is especially suited to construct a dialogic, polyphonic and inquisitive narrative to not only question but dialogue with the post-9/11 United States. Keywords: post-9/11 fiction; irony; satire; counter-discourse; carnivalization; perpetrator fiction","PeriodicalId":54016,"journal":{"name":"Atlantis-Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77536366","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":"Exorcising Personal Traumas / Silencing History: Jennifer Johnston's The Invisible Worm","authors":"Constanza del Río","doi":"10.28914/ATLANTIS-2017.39.1.173-188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28914/ATLANTIS-2017.39.1.173-188","url":null,"abstract":"Jennifer Johnston’s novel The Invisible Worm (1991) is an exemplary trauma narrative, both stylistically and thematically. It centres on the consciousness of its protagonist—Laura—and narrates her painful and protracted psychological process of coming to terms with a past marked by repeated sexual abuse by her father, which culminates in rape, and her mother’s consequent suicide. Yet The Invisible Worm is also a contemporary example of the Irish Big House novel, a genre that articulates the identitarian, historical and social plights of the Anglo-Irish. My intention in this article is to consider how the narrative’s evident interest in the personal dimension of Laura’s traumas works to obviate the socio-historical and political elements that have also contributed to the protagonist’s predicament. I will also analyse the different treatment afforded to the individual and the collective past: while the novel is explicit and optimistic in the case of Laura’s personal story, it remains reluctant to speak out about historical evils, with the result that, at the end of the novel, although freed from her personal traumas, Laura remains the prisoner of her historical legacy. Keywords: Trauma Studies; Irish history; the Irish Big House novel; Jennifer Johnston; The Invisible Worm","PeriodicalId":54016,"journal":{"name":"Atlantis-Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89300085","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":"Daniel Morris. 2013. Lyric Encounters: Essays on American Poetry from Lazarus and Frost to Ortiz Cofer and Alexie.","authors":"Antonio Jimenez-Munoz","doi":"10.5040/9781472543684","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472543684","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54016,"journal":{"name":"Atlantis-Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83862811","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":"Searching for a “Different Kind of Freedom”: Postcoloniality and Postfeminist Subjecthood in Zadie Smith’s \"NW\"","authors":"Lourdes López-Ropero","doi":"10.28914/ATLANTIS-2016.38.2.123-139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28914/ATLANTIS-2016.38.2.123-139","url":null,"abstract":"This paper attempts to open a new line of inquiry into Zadie Smith’s fourth novel NW (2012) by drawing attention to her investment in the contemporary feminine experience. I argue that by bringing women to center stage, NW marks a turning point in Smith’s fiction, while also bearing the hallmarks of the author’s previous work, namely her concern with Britain’s postcolonial legacy and issues of human connection. While Smith’s focus on self-monitoring educated women links the text to a postfeminist paradigm, the fact that these characters, and others, are of immigrant background locates the novel in the terrain of Britain’s postcolonial history and its multicultural present in twenty-first century London. My contention will be that far from adopting a celebratory approach to her postfeminist subjects as harbingers of social change, Smith points at the disabling aspects of this ideology, and the prevalence of racial and gender inequalities, problematizing individualistic notions of failure as self-responsibility. Keywords: postcolonialism; connectedness; postfeminism; female friendship; bildungsroman; impressionistic narrative","PeriodicalId":54016,"journal":{"name":"Atlantis-Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87676485","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":"“But What’s One More Murder?” Confronting the Holocaust in Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther Novels","authors":"A. Lake","doi":"10.28914/ATLANTIS-2016.38.1.89-107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28914/ATLANTIS-2016.38.1.89-107","url":null,"abstract":"Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series of Nazi Germany-set historical crime novels use irony in the exploration of themes of complicity, guilt and redemption in relation to the Holocaust. The use of irony enables Kerr’s protagonist Bernie Gunther to confront and describe the Holocaust and establish his sense of selfhood as an anti-Nazi. However, it does not empower him to resist the Nazis actively. Bernie seeks to confront the Holocaust and describe his experiences as an unwilling Holocaust perpetrator when he led an SS police battalion at Minsk in 1941. Later, his feelings of guilt at his complicity with the Nazis in the Holocaust haunt him, and he seeks redemption by pursuing justice to solve conventional murders. The redemption that Bernie Gunther pursues is called into question in the ninth novel in the series, A Man Without Breath (2013), when the possibility of active resistance to the Nazis is revealed to him when he witnesses the Rosenstrasse Protests in Berlin in 1943. This revelation raises the questions of agency and choice, and forces an ordinary German like Bernie Gunther to confront the possibility that he might have actively opposed the Nazis, rather than allow himself to become their accomplice. Keywords: detective fiction; Holocaust; Philip Kerr; irony; guilt; redemption","PeriodicalId":54016,"journal":{"name":"Atlantis-Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83299187","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":"Facing Old Age and Searching for Regeneration in a Dying American West: Gregory Martin’s Mountain City","authors":"David Río","doi":"10.28914/ATLANTIS-2016.38.1.149-164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28914/ATLANTIS-2016.38.1.149-164","url":null,"abstract":"Contemporary western American literature is increasingly departing from the traditional association between the West and youth in classical frontier mythology, showing an aging, gray and often ill West, as illustrated by authors such as Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, Wallace Stegner and Ken Haruf, to name just a few examples. This perspective also plays a powerful role in Gregory Martin’s Mountain City (2000), an impressive memoir about a decaying Nevada mining town and its aging population. This article explores the interaction between living and aging in Martin’s book. It is often a continuous dialogical process of exchange and overlap where Martin revises western mythology centered on the youth trope and deconstructs negative images of old age and disease. Martin offers a realistic portrait of a fading western way of life. However, his emphasis on the vanishing condition of traditional western stereotypes turns out to be problematic. In fact, Martin’s bleak vision of the Old West and its broken promises coexists in Mountain City with his recognition of the pervasive quality of the archetypal western regenerative influence, as exemplified by the power of this declining community to heal the narrator’s placelessness and provide him with a sense of “homeplace” and a cultural identity. Keywords: American West; non-fiction; Gregory Martin; old age; place; identity; home","PeriodicalId":54016,"journal":{"name":"Atlantis-Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85982359","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":"Christopher S. Butler and Francisco Gonzálvez-García. 2014. Exploring Functional-Cognitive Space. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.","authors":"D. Velasco","doi":"10.28914/ATLANTIS-2015.37.2.269-273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28914/ATLANTIS-2015.37.2.269-273","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54016,"journal":{"name":"Atlantis-Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2015-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86975995","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}