Bilocated Identities: Taking the Fork in the Road in Against the Day
Offering one of the first critical receptions on identity in Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel beyond the reviews, this paper seeks to show that bilocation, a fictional disposition affecting personal mobility in Against The Day, brings up the question of...
mehr
|
Volltext:
|
|
|
Zitierfähiger Link:
|
|
|
Offering one of the first critical receptions on identity in Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel beyond the reviews, this paper seeks to show that bilocation, a fictional disposition affecting personal mobility in Against The Day, brings up the question of what we are by suggesting what we could be. It investigates how the novel redefines and enlarges concepts of identity by exploring several aspects of sameness and selfhood exposed to a very special kind of migration: Being in two places, countries, or worlds at the same time, a multiplicity of characters in Against The Day opt for the excluded middle when a fork in the road presents itself. The paper investigates these new forms of identity in the novel and explores their impact on philosophical concepts such as the notion of a seamless continuity of identity, the role of subjectivity for identity, and the concept of a narrative identity.
|
Imaginary Jews and True Confessions: Ethnicity, Lyricism, and John Berryman’s Dreamsongs
Berryman was fascinated with the figure of "the imaginary Jew." The phrase is the title of his first short story, it recurs in The Dream Songs, and it was to have been the topic of the final chapter of his autobiographical novel Recovery. Critics...
mehr
|
Berryman was fascinated with the figure of "the imaginary Jew." The phrase is the title of his first short story, it recurs in The Dream Songs, and it was to have been the topic of the final chapter of his autobiographical novel Recovery. Critics have not treated Berryman's "imaginary Jew" kindly. Early critics saw prosopopoeia as uncongenial to the confessional project. More recent critics see the figure as a misappropriation of Jewish identity. Berryman, however, did not want to pass himself off as Jewish; he invented the figure to expose the anti-Semitism of Eliot and Pound. His strategy of impersonating the stereotypical figure of "the Jew" was also in keeping with contemporary theories of prejudice and identity, which followed Sartre and psychoanalysis in understanding Jewishness as a product of morbid projection. My essay traces the critical reception—and rejection—of Berryman in order to expose what I see as the "identitarian" bias of American studies since the 1970s, most recently evident in debates over "the Americanization of the Holocaust." Berryman's transpersonal poetry, I argue, is also transnational, both in its personification of Nazi victims and in its comparison of domestic racism and the Vietnam War to genocide. Berryman's concern is not identity but the violence implicit in designating the other as Other. This violence not only plays a role in prejudice but also in progressive theories of "ethnic lyricism" that see the individual as an expression of her "culture" or "nation" and the poem as a personification of the individual. ; escholarship.org/uc/item/4035s7ss
|
'Something black and of the night': Vampirism, Monstrosity, and Negotiations of Race in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend
Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), about a lone survivor in a postapocalyptic world inhabited by modern vampires, is the first major vampire novel of the 20th century and a direct response to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). While replacing the...
mehr
|
Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), about a lone survivor in a postapocalyptic world inhabited by modern vampires, is the first major vampire novel of the 20th century and a direct response to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). While replacing the supernaturalism of Stoker’s Gothic horror with science fiction elements, Matheson’s text is similarly concernedwith issues of racial ‘otherness’ centering around the liminal figure of the vampire and exhibits the same preoccupation with clean, unclean or mixed blood. This essay discusses the complex relationship between vampire fiction and discourses of race and monstrosity by analysing I Am Legend and its 2007 screen adaptation, whose manipulations of the original plot produced a film expressive of American attitudes towards science and religion after 9/11.
|
"Seht her, auf dies Gemälde und auf dies.": Zum Umgang mit Bildern aus John Boydells Shakespeare Gallery
Im Jahre 1789 eröffnete der britische Kupferstecher und Kunsthändler John Boydell (1719-1804) in London die „Shakespeare Gallery“: Mehr als 160 Gemälde nach Szenen und Figuren der Dramen William Shakespeares, die im Auftrag Boydells von renommierten...
mehr
|
Volltext:
|
|
|
Zitierfähiger Link:
|
|
|
Im Jahre 1789 eröffnete der britische Kupferstecher und Kunsthändler John Boydell (1719-1804) in London die „Shakespeare Gallery“: Mehr als 160 Gemälde nach Szenen und Figuren der Dramen William Shakespeares, die im Auftrag Boydells von renommierten Künstlern angefertigt wurden, machten seine Galerie nicht nur zu einem Zentrum des literarischen und künstlerischen Lebens in London, sondern sollten auch die Shakespeare-Illustration des gesamten 19. Jahrhunderts maßgeblich prägen. Die Göttinger Universitätsbibliothek erhielt die von Boydell herausgegebene gleichnamige Serie großformatiger Reproduktionsstiche als Geschenk des britischen Königs Georgs III. Der Prachtband zählt seither zu den besonderen Schätzen der Bibliothek. Zur Jahreswende 2007/2008 zeigte die Ausstellung „,Seht hier, auf dies Gemälde, und auf dies.‘ – Bilder aus John Boydells Shakespeare Gallery“ im Historischen Gebäude der Niedersächsischen Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen Illustrationen der „Shakespeare Gallery“ zu vielen der Dramen Shakespeares. In diesem Band sind die wichtigsten der Vorträge des Rahmenprogramms zur Ausstellung versammelt, das die intensive Rezeption des Dramatikers an der Göttinger Universität, in Deutschland wie international beleuchtet. ; univerlag.uni-goettingen.de/handle/3/isbn-978-3-941875-02-9
|
