Lena Finkle’s magic arc: hybrid influences in the Russian American graphic novel

ABSTRACT

The article examines Anya Ulinich’s graphic narrative Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel and the novel’s use of visual culture from both the author’s Russian and US American backgrounds. The article interrogates the use of history and timelines, Russian art history and Russian art education in Ulinich’s text. It also analyzes other literary constructs that influenced Ulinich’s novel: US American comics/graphic novels and their use of stereotype, and novels by Russian-speaking Jewish American writers, with their thematized Jewishness.     

‘We Listen for What the Waves Intone’: Intertextuality and the Circum-Atlantic Poetics of Seamus Heaney,Natasha Trethewey and Kwame Dawes

Abstract

This article argues that the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Natasha Trethewey and Kwame Dawes constructs the Atlantic space as an oceanic intertext. Utilising Joseph Roach’s notion of the circum-Atlantic, this article examines how Trethewey’s and Dawes’ intertextual engagement with Heaney highlights how the Atlantic rim retains ‘a memory imperfectly deferred’. Through tracing connections between the work of Heaney, Dawes and Trethewey it becomes apparent that, in addition to thematic preoccupations with the legacy of imperial racisms and colonial displacement, the writers share a similar set of motifs. These poets fashion watery interstices at the margins of the Atlantic – coastlines, bogs and flooded islands – as intercultural lieux de mémoire, resonant with memory and haunted by an intertextual poetics that evokes the chorus of ‘water-lost’ Atlantic voices. This article suggests that, although the Atlantic is fashioned as an agent of disconnection, violence and liminality, it also functions as a reminder of the deep time that joins the Atlantic regions and its archipelagos, with its layers of multiple temporalities and storied pasts.     

Institutional Gothic in the novels of Vladimir Sharov and Evgenii Vodolazkin

ABSTRACT

Vladimir Sharov (1952–2018) and Evgenii Vodolazkin (1964–) are among the most significant and influential writers of contemporary postmodern Russian fiction. This article argues that the subgenre of institutional Gothic – defined here as Gothic plots set in mental asylums, hospital wards, and other places of involuntary confinement – is an important structural and metafictional element in their novels. It also suggests that these authors’ use of the Gothic mode corresponds to the traditional function of Gothic narrative as a reaction to historical trauma. Each of the novels discussed here (Sharov’s Sled v sled [In Their Footsteps, 1988], and Vodolazkin’s Aviator [The Aviator, 2016]) re-sites traditional European Gothic plots in analogous Soviet and post-Soviet institutional settings, including the clinic, the prison camp, and the mental asylum. For context, the article also discusses Gothic aspects of Sharov’s later novels Repetitsii (The Rehearsals, 1992) and Do i vo vremia (Before and During, 1993).     

Speaking for herself: Andrea Dunbar and Bradford on film

In October 2010, the radio broadcaster Philip Dodd interviewed Clio Barnard about her new documentary, The Arbor (2010), based on the life of the late playwright Andrea Dunbar. As part of the film-making process, Barnard recorded audio interviews with Dunbar’s family then hired professional actors to lip-synch the responses in the film. Dodd had a major problem with this method: The Arbor is rooted in the lives of working-class Northern women, yet for Dodd, ‘they’re not good enough to be seen’. In a passionate defence, Barnard argued ‘I wanted people to speak for themselves’. This article examines Barnard’s film in conjunction with Rita, Sue and Bob Too!, for which Dunbar wrote the screenplay. A paradox is considered, where the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ female voices of Dunbar, her family and neighbours are then mediated by cinematic form; this is placed within a wider argument about how issues around realism and representation in documentary and fiction film contribute to our understanding of the North in popular culture. The analysis then situates this thinking in terms of the representation of Northern writers and spaces, considering how the site-specific locations of writers affect the kind of cultural texts that they are able to produce.     

Narratives of generationality in 21st-century North American Jewish literature: Krauss,Bezmozgis, Kalman

ABSTRACT

The article explores prominent contemporary texts by David Bezmozgis, Nadia Kalman, and Nicole Krauss to juxtapose the narratives of generationality they produce. I argue that these narratives depend on intersecting notions of family, genealogy, and (procreative) heterosexuality and on various formal temporal modes that these texts employ. Generationality, in recent Holocaust literature, as represented here by Krauss, seems to give rise to and rely on different familial/genealogical narratives than recent post-Soviet immigrant fiction. Krauss in The History of Love works with more traditional notions of temporality and history which, I claim, are linked with both exceptionalist and diachronic narratives of the Holocaust, and normative notions of romantic love and reproductive sexuality. Bezmozgis, in Natasha and Other Stories, among others, deconstructs the notion of a synchronic transnational Jewish community and critically deals with the centrality of Holocaust memorialization and also with concomitant sexual normativities. Finally, Kalman in The Cosmopolitans critically approaches diachronic generationality: she plays with genealogy modifying the representational conventions of the genealogical diagram and thereby enters into a productive dialog with Krauss’s text. Kalman also broadens the social setting to include other ethnicities, people of color, and queer sexual practices. What is at stake in the comparison proposed here is exposing key features of contemporary North American locations of Jewishness. Reading these texts along the narratives of generationality suggests that post-Soviet Jewish American writers, and especially the women writers of the subgenre, project a vision of community that is quite open and make us question various hegemonic coordinates of Jewishness.     

Patriarchy and incest in William Faulkner's 'Absalom! Absalom!' and Juan Rulfo's 'Pedro Páramo'

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of patriarchy and incest in the work of William Faulkner and Juan Rulfo. Focusing primarily on Absalom! Absalom! and Pedro Páramo, I argue that Rulfo adopts and, at the same time, interrogates Faulkner's patriarchal model of the family: the incestuous relationships that characterize Absalom! Absalom! reappear, under different disguises, in the Mexican writer's novel. My analysis also suggests that both Faulkner and Rulfo were intrigued by the symbolic implications of incest, and exploited these implications in order to talk about the collapse of the patriarchal and cultural order in the post-Civil War South and early 20th century Mexico respectively. The conclusion maintains that, despite Rulfo's reluctance to acknowledge Faulkner's impact on his artistic consciousness, the intertextual dialogue between the two writers should be read both as a form of incest, and as a quest for a new social structure.     

Poetics of place and the transformation of the Russian Jewish American self in Lara Vapnyar’s The Scent of Pine and Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s Panic in a Suitcase

ABSTRACT

In The Scent of Pine and Panic in a Suitcase, Russian Jewish American authors Lara Vapnyar and Yelena Akhtiorskaya explore the interiority of the immigrant self in various stages of the immigrant journey from the former Soviet Union to the United States and back. Both novels display a general trend in this literature to move away from the prescribed paradigms of Jewish American immigrant self-understanding, and toward a more private sense of the immigrant self, a movement away from the familiar confines of immigrant urban enclaves and toward a poetics of place that expands the modalities in which post-Soviet Jewish characters interact with US American space.     

“I too might once have been a prisoner”: oppressor’s paranoia in J.M. Coetzee,Nadine Gordimer and Breyten Breytenbach

The oppressors and men complicit with oppression in J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands, Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist and Breyten Breytenbach’s The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist have markedly different personalities, occupy diverse social settings and become alive to the reader through different literary techniques, but they strikingly resemble each other, because they are paranoid, delusional and plagued by repressed feelings of guilt. The article identifies this approach to the oppressor’s mind as one that is typical of white writers writing against apartheid, and analyses the representations and functions of paranoia in Coetzee’s, Gordimer’s and Breytenbach’s texts as well as possible reasons for the strikingly similar portrayal of the oppressor’s mind.     

Swallowed futures,indigestible pasts Post-apocalyptic narratives of rights in Kleist and Doctorow

Abstract

Previous analyses of the intertextual relations between Heinrich von Kleist's 'Michael Kohlhaas' (1810–11) and E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1976[1975]) have focused on adaptation, assessing the changes made to the original. By contrast, this article focuses on what motivates the choice of Kleist's novella as an intertext in the first place and argues for a different, narrative logic binding the two. Both texts fixate with great ambivalence on the potential for transcending pervasive difference in the general and common, and they are both post-apocalyptic responses, alternately tragic and ironic visions of transcended difference. Together, the two tell a story of the discursive formation and deformation of the idea of universal human rights – a story that suspends the discourse of human rights between two traumatic moments of articulation and violence (in the late 18th century and the mid-20th century, respectively) that animate, yet remain inaccessible to each text.     

Marie-Claire Blais and Dostoevsky: Observations from the Notebooks

This article demonstrates the pervasive presence of Dostoevsky in the oeuvre of Canadian writer Marie-Claire Blais—three-time winner of the Governor-General’s Award for literature—through analysis of her working notebooks and individual novels. Blais’ thirteen working notebooks (1962–1974) contain one hundred eighty references to works and characters in Russian literature, some sixty of which relate to Dostoevsky. Analysis of these references shows that Blais throughout her formative years studied Dostoevsky rigorously and thoroughly. Using the seven mentions of Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov as a starting point, we examine Blais’ creation of a series of Alyosha-figures in Un Joualonais sa Joualonie (1973), Visions d’Anna, ou le vertige (1982), and Dans la foudre et la lumière (2001), each representing a possible alternative development of the character-type. The theme of innocent suffering (Ivan Karamazov’s “the single tear of a child”) is traced in David Sterne (1967), Un Joualonais sa Joualonie (1973), and Soifs (1995).     

Assemblies of Chairs: The Politics of Spectatorship in Post-Traumatic Times

What modalities of spectatorship and performance are emerging today, and why? How do we gather in the face of crisis—ordinary and extraordinary—and violence—traumatic and not-quite-traumatic? What might be gleaned from contemporary performance for other genres of response to crisis, whether clinical, critical, or political? To what extent are psychoanalytic theories of trauma helpful for describing modalities of historical violence in the present? This essay approaches questions such as these by turning to 3 disparate yet resonant sites of recent performance: Combatant Status Review Tribunal, pp. 002954-003064: A Public Reading by Andrea Geyer et al. (2012); Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013); and Rashid Johnson’s production of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s play, Dutchman, at the East Village’s Russian and Turkish Baths (2013).     

Market/society: mapping conceptions of power,ideology and subjectivity in Polanyi,Hayek, Foucault,Lukács

ABSTRACT

In light of discussions around the common anniversary of the publication of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, this article puts these texts – iconic representations of social democratic and neoliberal political theory – into conversation with Michel Foucault’s subsequent, influential critique of neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics. There are interesting points of contact in the way each text constructs its argument, even as they arrive at distinct positions vis-à-vis the material and subjective nature of market society, while nevertheless sharing an opposition to Marxian approaches. Yet the work of Polanyi and Hayek’s Marxian contemporary, Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, offers precisely a critical framework for understanding the relationship between markets, liberty and society in which the material and the subjective need not be read as antagonistic. It is thus also examined here, in an effort to shed light on how discussions of contemporary neoliberalism are framed.     

Literary clinical practice: desire,depression and toxic masculinity in Hamlet

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces the notion of a literary clinical practice for which it remains essential to continue to consider those texts that open up a place for a readership, or audience, or even a civilization to consider the endlessly generative failure of its literature to write mental health. Concerned with mental illness that is an effect of language on the subject, the body, and of the enigma of the truth as cause, psychoanalysis is the crucial interlocutor for any literary clinical concern with the maladies of literature and society. In order to re-assess the utility of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to contemporary problems such as depression – perhaps the dominant symptom of our time – this essay attempts a reconsideration of Jacques Lacan’s famous seminar on Hamlet from the perspective of the contemporary clinic of the Lacanian orientation in psychoanalysis led by Jacques-Alain Miller.     

The iemoto system and the avant-gardes in the Japanese artistic field: Bourdieu's field theory in comparative perspective

The conceptual framework of ‘field’ proposed by Pierre Bourdieu and his model of the literary and artistic fields in nineteenth‐century France are widely applied to studies of the development of the literary and artistic fields in other regions and the fields of other cultural practices. These researches, while showing similarities to Bourdieu’s model, reveal the distinct forms of nomos which those different fields developed through localised contingencies. In other words, their findings highlight the cultural specificity of the cases on which Bourdieu’s field theory is based. The main purpose of this paper is to argue that the field theory can be beneficially applied to cross‐cultural cases provided that its culturally specific elements are clearly identified. For this purpose, I focus on one particular aspect associated with the nomos of Bourdieu’s model – the orientation toward autonomy – to argue for its cultural specificity, which becomes clearer when it is compared to a distinct case of the artistic field in early‐twentieth‐century Japan. My case study shows that the Japanese artistic field did not develop the same form of autonomy as Bourdieu’s model, but it also discloses the processes in which a certain form of nomos was shaped through the struggles between the artistic field and other fields.     

DUALISM AND DESIRE IN THE LANDSCAPE OF THE DIVINE

Through depictions of the landscape in the literary works of contemporary Jewish national-religious poets and writers, ambivalence in their relationship towards their natural and man-made surroundings is laid bare. The implementation of the Israeli occupation on the West Bank has rendered a profound impact on the landscape; yet for religious Jewish settlers who subscribe to the promise of redemption that will mark the unification of Jews, God and the land – such unity is desired yet unattainable. In the reading of these texts, the landscape takes on many of the qualities of Jacques Lacan's ‘objet a’ that is both a surplus of the Real and testimony to its absence. Coveted and resented, pure and profane, inclusive and alienating – the portrayed spaces and places of the Israeli occupation allude to binary poles that can be read through Bruno Latour's investigation on the nature of ‘factishes’; these render the depiction of the landscape a unison between what its dwellers are, and what they desire. Through the prism of these two approaches, the depicted landscape of the Israeli occupation that emerges from these texts is one that borrows from Zionist ideology, and yet carves for itself its own niche. In its relationship with the land and the landscape, religious-national sentiment is not yet another manifestation of a national ideology (though it both feeds from and is fed by it), but is propelled by the desire to lay claim to the Lacanian notion of a longed-for Real. In these as yet relatively unstudied texts, the landscape of occupation maps the landscape of its writers’ pleasures and pains, and that of continuous desire.     

Mothers behaving badly: chaotic hedonism and the crisis of neoliberal social reproduction

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the significance of the plethora of representations of mothers ‘behaving badly’ in contemporary anglophone media texts, including the films Bad Moms, Fun Mom Dinner and Bad Mom’s Christmas, the book and online cartoons Hurrah for Gin and the recent TV comedy dramas Motherland, The Let Down and Catastrophe. All these media texts include representations of, first, mothers in the midst of highly chaotic everyday spaces where any smooth routine of domesticity is conspicuous by its absence; and second, mothers behaving hedonistically, usually through drinking and partying, behaviour that is more conventionally associated with men or women without children. After identifying the social type of the mother behaving badly (MBB), the article locates and analyses it in relation to several different social and cultural contexts. These contexts are: a neoliberal crisis in social reproduction marked by inequality and overwork; the continual if contested role of women as ‘foundation parents’; and the negotiation of longer-term discourses of female hedonism. The title gestures towards a popular British sitcom of the 1990s, Men Behaving Badly, which popularized the idea of the ‘new lad’; and this article suggests that the new lad’s counterpart, the ladette, is mutating into the mother behaving badly, or the ‘lad mom’. Asking what work this figure does now, in a later neoliberal context, it argues that the mother behaving badly is simultaneously indicative of a widening and liberating range of maternal subject positions and symptomatic of a profound contemporary crisis in social reproduction. By focusing on the classed and racialised dynamics of the MBB – by examining who exactly is permitted to be hedonistic, and how – and by considering the MBB’s limited and partial imagining of progressive social change, the article concludes by emphasizing the urgency of creating more connections between such discourses and ‘parents behaving politically’.     

Prophetic Reading: Sisterhood and Psychoanalysis in H.D.’s HERmione

Abstract

This article offers a comparative reading of H.D.’s 1927 kunstlerroman à clef, HERmione and Freud’s Dora alongside an intertextual close reading of its dense web of literary allusions in order to argue that it offers a sustained critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and an alternative origin story for the condition of hysteria. Drawing on the notion of prophecy as it is thematised in the novel, the article demonstrates H.D.’s prefiguring of Juliet Mitchell’s recent reconfiguration of hysteria as a response to, replacement by, or failure of identification with a sibling.