Free to Fantasize: The Impact of Psychoanalytically Informed Psychotherapy on the Fantasy Life of Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACT

One legacy of childhood sexual abuse is the adult survivor's deep alienation from his/her own fantasy life which is accompanied by a profound distrust of the imaginings of others, including the therapist's. This article explores the nature of the survivor's fantasy life; it elucidates recurrent themes and explicates the patient's attitude towards fantasy. Further, it suggests ways in which psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy can liberate the survivor's capacity to engage freely in fantasy, perhaps for the first time.     

Enabling Fictions: Philip Roth's Prosthetic Anne Franks

Abstract

In this article, it is argued that insufficient attention has been paid to Philip Roth's uses of Anne Frank in his work. Concentrating on the 'Zuckerman' and 'Philip Roth' novels in which Anne Frank is discussed, it is illustrated that Anne Frank functions as a 'narrative prosthesis' not only in Roth's work and within American postwar culture, but that all representations of Anne Frank function as narrative prosthesis. The concept of Anne Frank as narrative prosthesis allows for recognition of the fact that Roth characterises writing and identity as prosthesis. Exploration of Roth's uses of Anne Frank also exposes problematics in his own work, particularly in his representations of women.     

Free agent or ‘conscious automaton’? Contrasting interpretations of the individual in Spencer's writing on social and moral life

Herbert Spencer remains an important and intriguing figure in thinking about political, social and moral matters. At present his writings in relation to idealist thought, social policy, sociology and ethics are undergoing reassessment. This article is concerned with some recent interpretations of Spencer on individuals in social life. It looks in some detail at Spencer's work on psychology and sociology as well as on ethics, seeking to establish how Spencer understood people as social individuals. In particular the neglect of Spencer's denial of freedom of the will is identified as a problem in some recent interpretations. One of his contemporary critics, J.E. Cairnes, charged that Spencer's own theory of social evolution left even Spencer himself the status of only a ‘conscious automaton’. This article, drawing on a range of past and present interpretative discussions of Spencer, seeks to show that Spencerian individuals are psychically and socially so constituted as to be only indirectly responsive to moral suasion, even to that of his own Principles of Ethics as he himself acknowledged. Whilst overtly reconstructionist projects to develop a liberal utilitarianism out of Spencer to enliven political and philosophical debate for today are worthwhile—dead theorists have uses—care needs to be taken that the original context and its concerns with the processes associated with innovation (and decay) in social life are not thereby eclipsed, the more so since in some important respects they have recently received little systematic attention even though the issues have contemporary relevance in sociology.     

Holding the Traveller's Gaze Accountable in Shiva Naipaul's North of South: An African Journey

Abstract

Travelogues are partly based on what is witnessed, observed and noted about the places and people visited and what is already known in advance, mainly from an existing archive. The archive, therefore, is an important element in travel writing. However, an author cannot avoid responsibility for what she/he notes/writes/composes about a place and its people. In a sense, a biography of a place may represent a writer's struggles to compromise between the material in the archive – such as existing books on the subject of his/her writing – and what she/he actually observed/observes. The veracity of the writer's narrative/story is dependent on the logic of the evidence that he/she adduces. The weight of the archived narrative, however, can burden the writer in which case he/she would need to limit its influence in order to tell a ‘believable’ story. Shiva Naipaul's extensive reliance on the existing pre- and colonial-time archive of writing on Africa seriously undermines his representation of life in postcolonial East Africa. The result is a travelogue filled with a great sense of personal disappointment with the political, cultural, economic and social conditions in postcolonial Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia – the countries that he visits. Shiva seems to unwittingly translate this sense of deep disappointment into a ‘demonisation’ of Eastern Africa. Whilst acknowledging that there is a difference – and an important one – between a text and the world that it seeks to represent, the key proposition in this paper is that Naipaul's biography does not offer any redemptive characterisation of both the African space and the people that he writes about precisely because it summons a biased archive as evidence for its own claims.     

The ‘Glasgow King of Billingsgate’: James MacQueen and an Atlantic Proslavery Network1

This article examines the ‘imperial career’ of James MacQueen, one of the most outspoken critics of the British antislavery campaign in the 1820s and 1830s. Rather than considering the particular proslavery discourses that he articulated in his writing, however, the article focuses on his central place within an Atlantic network of proslavery advocacy. Using published and unpublished sources to explore this network, the article begins with MacQueen's time as a plantation overseer in Grenada. Next, it considers his involvement in the slavery controversy after he returned to Glasgow, including his attack on the History of Mary Prince (1831) and its aftermath. Finally, the article considers MacQueen's unexpected role in the Niger Expedition following the abolition of British slavery. In this way, the article demonstrates MacQueen's central place in nineteenth-century anti-abolitionism.     

Fighting Battles with History: The Novelist Louis Golding and the Story of the ‘Doomington Wanderer’

This article explores the writing of Louis Golding in the context of existing scholarship on the Anglo-Jewish novel. It assesses the importance of Golding's background and beliefs in shaping his fiction. Golding's views bridge the cultural gap between eastern European Jewish schtetl life and interwar British society. On one hand, he was a militant supporter of Jewish/non-Jewish intermarriage, of secular Judaism and religious freedom. At the same time his writing reveals a sustained belief in Jewish ‘race’ and Jewish spirituality. Golding's writing on ‘race’ will receive particular attention. Like so many other British Jews in the period, the author seems to have been caught between his desire to fight the racism of the Third Reich and his own confused ‘racial’ attitudes.     

The Judgments of David Bergelson

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I read the Yiddish author David Bergelson’s statements at his secret trial through the lens of his own earlier fiction about Soviet justice, especially his novel Judgment. I examine Bergelson’s self-fashioning as a Jewish writer and how he uses his own Jewish background as a justification for his failures as a Soviet person. I offer some contextualization of Bergelson’s statements in light of other trials of other writers both before and after 1952, and compare his declaration of love for Yiddish with other, similar expressions. Bergelson does not merely defend himself, he creates a memory about his legacy for the future.     

Proclamations and Silences: ‘Race’, Self-Fashioning and Sexuality in the Trans-Atlantic Correspondence between Langston Hughes and Richard Rive

Abstract

The article draws on research for a larger project – a (literary) biography of writer, essayist and educationist Richard Rive (1930–1989). In this piece, the correspondence between Rive and Langston Hughes, as well as creative, critical and autobiographical works by Rive, provide the sources for an examination of ways in which the Cape-based writer forged a sense of self in the face of acute racial oppression, and how he left unspoken or deeply encoded his sense of his own homosexuality. Gilroy's notion of the creation of meaning through movement across the Atlantic proves useful to a point, but my argument is that Gilroy's ‘double consciousness’ is more applicable to black diaspora in the north than it is to a figure like Rive, who proves to be far more multivalent and contradictory in his self-fashioning as a non-racialist, a South African and both a black and cosmopolitan writer.     

Boris Eikhenbaum's Response to the Crisis of the Novel in the 1920s

Abstract

Focusing on the Russian literary scholar Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959), the present article considers the interrelationship of autobiographical, scholarly and fictional modes of writing. In 1925 Eikhenbaum wrote in a letter of his 'longing for acts, longing for biography'. This article views the scholar's acute sense of diminished agency in the context of the crisis of the novel in the 1920s and discusses how Eikhenbaum's own generic experimentation becomes a means of finding an answer to the question he posed to himself and his age of 'how to be a writer'. The discussion is primarily based on Eikhenbaum's autobiographical sketches in Moi vremennik (My Periodical, 1929) and his scholarly monograph, Lev Tolstoi. Piatidesiatye gody (Lev Tolstoi: The Fifties, 1928), and attention is drawn to the generic, rhetorical and narrative strategies used across these hybrid scholarly texts, which in turn become invested with a certain emotional and ethical charge. In the end, the article shows how, above all, Eikhenbaum's empathetic engagement with Tolstoi marks for him the restoration of 'biography' and the solution to the entwined epochal and personal crises of genre and authorship.     

“My Adoptive Father”

Abstract

Gay men's intimate life worlds have been the topic of some empirical inquiry since the late twentieth century. Drawing on the symbolism of love, friendship, and biology, these studies discuss the recent changes in queer communities that have shaped contemporary discourse about gay and lesbian family life. What appears missing in these intimate accounts are the lesser known readings of gay male intimate relationships which are both sensitive to the complex, interactive, and often contradictory experiences of everyday family life and attentive to the contextual ways these stories become constructed. This paper is a presentation of an experimental case study narrative which grapples with the practical, everyday considerations of what it means to create and sustain a supportive familial relationship between two gay men. Documenting the complexities of this contemporary familial arrangement provides us with some important opportunities for gay storytelling. In this instance, it allowed the author to better understand how two gay men like Ted and Simon came to construct their own notions of a father-son relationship. It also encourages us to explore how new gay identities and relationships are forged and negotiated over time through the biographical lens of family membership.     

Redefining the American Revolutionary: Gabriela Mistral on José Martí

Abstract

This essay criticizes the historical investment of Martí's readers in a discourse that values conservative, sexually unambiguous femininity and masculinity. The essay grapples with the vituperative register of José Martí's misogyny in order to reveal another version of the American revolutionary. Drawing on one of his earliest feminist critics, Gabriela Mistral, I show how corporeal tropes in Martí's rhetoric betray instances of empathy with emerging alternative practices of femininity and masculinity. Assisted by Mistral's overlooked and overtly gendered critique, this essay limns a tropical Martí — an embodied, sensual, demonumentalized poet who plays with language. In readings of Mistral's several essays devoted to Martí, the essay shows how Mistral's Martí represents an alternative to the heroic masculinism and violent militarism of a longstanding revolutionary American tradition.     

Modernist misapprehensions of Foucault's aesthetics

Abstract

Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and Jürgen Habermas, accuse Foucault of being an ‘aestheticist’. As such, Foucault fails to realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible by modernity's rationalization, which offers better resources for emancipation than dangerous aestheticizations. This paper argues that such criticisms mistakenly deploy only certain modernist notions of aesthetics against Foucault. There are some fair grounds for holding that Foucault does appeal to such conceptions of aesthetics in his theorization of transgression, not least because of his interest in modernist, avant‐garde writers and artists such as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall, Foucault's interest in avant‐garde aesthetics is not modernist in the sense understood by his critics. Foucault tends to focus on modernist illustration of the absence of foundations for representation and language, adopting a paraesthetic angle of critique. The limiting conditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light as both contingent yet necessary. Foucault's model of critique is developed in his early analyses of avant‐garde art and then expanded to cover subjectivity and the aesthetics of existence in his later philosophical critical ethos of modernity. Foucault uses avant‐garde art as a critical mode of reflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present.     

Review Article

Abstract

The fate of Aleksei Remizov's first novel, Prud (The Mere) was something which never ceased to concern the writer in later years. As experimental as any work of fiction produced in Russia before the October Revolution, the first and second editions of The Mere which appeared in 1905 and 1907 respectively found favour with none of the critics. Remizov responded to some of the criticisms made of these early versions and went on to produce a third edition in 1911, which critics greeted enthusiastically as being almost a new work. For all its critical success, however, Remizov remained dissatisfied with the rewritten novel. The correspondence between Remizov and associates of the Prague publishing house 'Plamia' published here enables us to piece together the background to the writer's work on the fourth redaction of The Mere, which he was able to complete in Paris during 1925. The fact that 'Plamia' was subsequently unable to publish the novel in this redaction was a source of disappointment to Remizov for the rest of his life. It has recently been published in the USA for the first time (Aleksei Remizov's Prud (The Mere). The Final Text of the Novel, ed. by R. J. Keys [Oakland, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 2004]).     

Wresting Memory from the Violence of the Present: Rape,Martyrdom, and Double Narrative in Paul Friedrich's Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village*

Abstract Post-Modernist critiques of ethnographic method tend to reduce research and writing to only writing and erase the traces of the researcher's field experience that may appear in a text. Such critiques confer more power on the ethnographer or oral historian than he or she possesses. I argue that researchers invariably manoeuvre within political contexts in order to obtain knowledge, and that the intersubjective interaction between scholar and subject creates both silences and visibilities in the final text. In Agrarian Revolt Paul Friedrich constructed a revolutionary counter memory against his own hidden master narrative of opportunism, betrayal, and political violence. Yet partly due to his interaction with members of the competing political clans, he replicated in his counter-memeory the crucial premises of the ruling clan's ideology: the ‘doctrine of genealogical unity’ and its correlates of blood descent and female purity.     

In memory of C. West Churchman (1913–2004) Reminiscences,retrospectives, and reflections

Abstract

C. West Churchman, the grand old man of the ‘systems approach’, is dead. Born on 29 August 1913 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he was 90 years of age. After a rich and significant life of scholarship, he died on 21 March 2004 in Bolinas, California. A former student and collaborator of Professor Churchman offers this commemorative essay. He looks back on his years with West (as everybody called him) at the University of California, Berkeley, and reflects on the way this changed his understanding of the systems approach. The paper also offers a sketch of some of the core concerns and concepts of Churchman’s philosophy of social systems design; a short summary of his professional career; an overview of his major publications; and a list of recommended readings.     

Bourdieu,Wharton and Changing Culture in The Age of Innocence

Although critics often attribute the failure of Edith Wharton's characters to achieve happiness to dichotomous, even mutually exclusive causes - that is, to deficiency of character or to force of circumstance - the theories of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu help to illuminate the more complex cultural and literary project at the heart of Wharton's work. Bourdieu's notions of field, habitus and capital speak to the dynamic rather than static nature of social relations in The Age of Innocence, Wharton's penultimate novel about conflict between stultifying social conventions and imagined but seldom realized escapes from such restrictions. Bourdieu's work helps us to see how Wharton embraces fluid rather fixed notions of culture in both her fiction and life. Vacillating throughout the novel between love for May Welland and for Ellen Olenska, Newland Archer stands at a crossroads between the fields of marriage and romance - between social convention and individual desire. Pulled by the competing demands of these fields, he progressively loses capital in both. Wharton documents the process by which Archer becomes constrained by a habitus shared with May; she also demonstrates - through multiple examples of cultural transformation - the degree to which he creates his own experience of having missed ‘the flower of life’. Archer's problem, then, is not only the field in which he operates but his acceptance of the narrowness of this field. In contrast, through the character of Ellen Olenska as well as minor figures such as Catherine Mingott, Bob Spicer, Julius Beaufort, Emerson Sillerton and Dallas Archer, Wharton affirms the processes of social change and shows that, although one cannot help replicating social hierarchies and taste, one can participate in the constructing one's social destiny.     

Reproduction revisited: comprehending complex educational trajectories

Pierre Bourdieu's famous theory of educational reproduction is often depicted by critics in simplistic terms: individuals either have plenty of cultural capital, and thus symbolic mastery and school success, or they do not and develop practical mastery and vocational interests instead. Social mobility, deviant trajectories and resistance, on the other hand, are seemingly impossible. The nature of Bourdieu's writing fuelled this perception, but implicit in his early work, and elaborated in his later writings, is the idea that class and capital possession are fully relational, gradational and refracted by family dynamics, thereby suggesting the existence of all manner of possible shades of difference between the two poles of reproduction. This paper, whilst acknowledging that reproduction is still the major feature of the education system in the UK, thus revisits Bourdieu's thesis and sketches some of the manifestations of this intermediate zone of educational performance, namely social space travel, the Icarus effect, recovered trajectories and pathways born of dispersed family fields. In so doing it draws on a qualitative research project examining the life histories of adults from a variety of class positions in Bristol.     

Internationalizing the US Ethnic Canon: Revisiting Carlos Bulosan

Abstract

The quasi-autobiographical writing of Carlos Bulosan, a migrant farmworker from the US colony of the Philippines from the 1930s to the 1950s, was discovered by ethnic activists during the US Civil Rights struggles. Once adopted as canonical texts in the US academy from the 1980s on, Bulosan's radical edge was blunted in critical readings of his work, his subversive tendencies sanitized to promote a conformist multiculturalism. We need to recover a submerged decolonizing strand in the history of Filipino deracination, sedimented in Bulosan's testimonies. This essay seeks to excavate those oppositional impulses in Bulosan's works by re-contextualizing them in the anti-colonial revolutionary movement of Filipinos dating back to the revolution of 1896; to the Filipino-American War together with the peasant insurgencies during the first three decades of US occupation (1899–1935); and in the popular-front mobilization during the US Great Depression up to the onset of the Cold War. Re-situated in their historical-biographical milieu and geopolitical provenance, Bulosan's oeuvre acquires immediacy and resonance.     

Strength Broadsides from Disability on the Arts

This book is a deeply personal treatise connecting experienceto the very tangible social constructs around Dis-Ability. We are writing as what Masefield calls TAP s – temporarilyable people – with experience of working in communitydevelopment and community arts: his own life exemplifies this.Masefield was a respected and successful theatre director andcommunity arts manager when, at forty-four, he developed a debilitatingand devastating myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), which renderedhim speechless and almost immobile. Indeed, one of the mostpowerful parts of the book is where he describes his own transitionfrom able to disabled like ‘trying to run a car on a torchbattery’. A very useful ‘way in’ to all ofthis     

‘The Greatest Thing in North America’: Delmore Schwartz and Europe

Abstract

An argument is presented that Delmore Schwartz’s celebrations of his European literary heritage accentuate the ways in which he might be regarded as a specifically American poet: he cannot help but Americanize his European sources. These engagements also, however, unsettle the notion of a purely American poetry since they suggest that American writing can only be understood in relation to English and European traditions. Taking his concept of ‘international consciousness’ as its premise, the study examines how Schwartz’s allusions simultaneously serve to align his poetry with European works and to distance it from them. It also assesses Schwartz’s admiration for the international perspectives of modernist mentors (particularly T. S. Eliot), observing how this aspect of their work influences his own. A reading of ‘The Ballad of the Children of the Czar’, a poem in which Schwartz characteristically sets individual experience against a worldwide stage, is also given.