Vol.65  No.1  2019

William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies has been dissected for its symbolic objects and gestures―such as the conch, Piggy’s glasses, the fire, and Jack’s mask―as a means of reading the novel’s allegorical and religious depiction of human evil. The conch itself has productive associations with speech and parliaments, and Golding’s range of language registers in description and dialogue has also been discussed. Yet one minor but suggestive aspect as yet overlooked is the boys’ exclamatory interjections and profanities, which are not random but form a structurally intelligent thematic continuum. The exclamations categorically progress from playfully defiant onomatopoeic sounds and humorous body-oriented expressions, to angrier animal comparisons and humiliating references to sexual acts, finishing with complex abstractions such as religious blasphemies. These spontaneous utterances provide conversational realism but also meaningfully mirror and index the ongoing moral maturation and corruption of the characters in their rising offensiveness, lexical power and aggressiveness, and instrumental uses as tools of violence and dominance.

keyword : Lord of the Flies, William Golding, apocalyptic literature, profanity, interjections

The article explores the means that activate the reader and encourage him/her to become a co-author of the fictional narrative. Starting from the premise that from the 19th to the early 21st century different strategies engage the figural reader―created as a character in the novel―or the implied reader―inscribed into it―to creatively respond to the narrative’s representations the focus is on the addressivity of a text. Especially where the narrator or writer figure creates a dialogic situation with the reader or a narratee, reader stimulation becomes crucial. The article re-considers theoretical approaches of reader orientation and reader-response criticism. For epistolary novels of the 18th century perspectivisation has been defined as an effective instrument of reader mobilisation, and the gaps in narrative representations were generally found to be the most usual device. Other means to inspire interaction, however, are asking for investigation. The major examples chosen for this exploration are therefore works in which the role of the reader is very carefully and clearly designed: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey with its discussion of the anti-novel discourse of the late 18^th century, William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair as a realistic novel, where the narrator’s playful interaction with the reader repeatedly emerges, E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey as an Edwardian text in which socio-political and sociocultural issues, often satirically presented by an impersonal narrator, are able to excite the contemporaries. The recent novel by Irish writer John Banville, The Blue Guitar, exposes the significance of the metanarrative for postmodernist fictions.

keyword : Reader-oriented analysis, creative reader participation, addressivity of narrative fiction, unreliable reader, multiple reader

This essay surveys the Roman concept of “auctoritas” as a supra-juridical power in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Critics have contextualized the play within Shakespeare’s contemporary regicidal discourses, but, historically, Caesar’s official position before his death was as a dictator perpetuo, who could monopolize or silence the auctoritas of the Senate. In republican Rome, auctoritas signified the power of the Senate as fathers of the nation that could claim a justitium, the Roman version of the state of exception. The Senate’s declaration of senatus consultum ultimum suspended existing political powers (potestas) by creating a juridical vacuum. This basic premise allows us to read the play as a conflict between two supra-juridical powers―the Senate’s auctoritas and the singular sovereignty Caesar might claim. Seen from the perspective of sovereignty, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a peculiar narrative as it shows a series of sovereign acts of violence and exceptional states that can hardly be contained within juridical norms. The Lupercalia that foregrounds the main action of the play―the assassination of Caesar―demonstrates that Caesar is a wargus, a banned wolf. This is due to his sovereignty, a position located outside the legal body. The following Forum scene and the Roman deaths that fill the stage show that the clash between the Senate’s auctoritas and singular sovereignty can cause extended constitutional vacuums and anomie states. However, the result of the clash is more than an anomie as it generates a new political order by ultimately forming the very foundation of a new nomos, Augustus’s sovereign Empire.

keyword : Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, political theology, auctoritas, justititum, senatus consultum ultimum

This paper examines the narrator’s functions of memory, love and self-realization in Julian Barnes’s 2011 Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Sense of an Ending. Using Frank Kermode’s identical title, Barnes adapts the concept of peripeteia to show how the narrator, Tony Webster, distorts and misremembers his own past. Tony faces his peripeteia in relation to a love triangle with his ex-girlfriend, Veronica, and his schoolmate, Adrian. Beginning with the recollection of his memory caused by the contents of a will from Veronica’s mother, Tony goes back to his university days after forty years. Tony confesses he forgot what he had written to Adrian who politely had asked for permission to meet Veronica; and later it turns out that with jealously and rage Tony sent Adrian a postcard of the Clifton Suspension Bridge where surprisingly people jump to death, and moreover a letter with curses to Adrian and Veronica including their next generation. After six months, when he heard about Adrian’s shocking suicide, he simply accepted the reason of Adrian’s death in his own way and went on to live his life. Without recognizing the aftermath of his past acts, Tony comes to know after forty years that Adrian has a mentally challenged son whose mother is not Veronica but Veronica’s mother, Sarah. What matters to him in the case is that Tony loved Veronica and his blind love caused his stupid behavior. By illustrating Tony’s fallibility of memory and past acts, this paper stresses Tony’s self-realization in stupidity Avital Ronell argues; namely, Tony’s stupidity is a part of his nature but is not perceived. In this vein, the peripeteia entangled with his love in The Sense of an Ending is a literary device for Tony to recollect and reconstruct his past, present and, even probably, future by relating himself with others.

keyword : The Sense of an Ending, peripeteia, fallibility of memory, stupidity, self-realization

This paper defines Slaughterhouse-Five and In the Lake of the Woods as ‘trauma narrative’ texts describing the memory and the psychological collapse of people who have experienced past traumatic events like war and massacre. From the perspective of ‘traumatic narrative’ and ‘literary healing,’ this study tries to analyze the split life of Billy Pilgrim and the narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five who were survivors of the Dresden bombing, and John’s isolation and his separated life in In the Lake of the Woods, hiding the fact of his being a perpetrator in a massacre during the Vietnam War but perpetually suffering from a guilty conscience. Vonnegut and O’Brien assert that no cause can justify war and massacre, while more effectively presenting fragmented lives tainted by the horror of war and the slaughter of the trauma survivors through postmodern narratives. These two authors employ strategies that use combinations of facts and imagination, the destruction of time, an erasing of the boundaries between history and stories, a meta-fiction technique that reflects the author’s self-consciousness, and montage techniques rather than realistic descriptions of their characters’ torn lives and the horrors of war or massacre. These narratives leave a stronger message and a bitter aftertaste, rather than mere factual representations. They want to eliminate false myths and rationalizations about human war and massacre by writing about the people who can’t forget traumatic memory and healing being possibly impossible. This paper asserts that Vonnegut and O’Brien try to induce readers to sympathize with a call to end situations that cause trauma, and to find a way of personal or collective healing through writing about trauma.

keyword : The Narratives of Traumatic Memory, Amnesia, Literary Healing, Slaughterhouse-Five, In the Lake of the Woods

The paper attempts a revisionary analysis of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire by focusing on the positive aspect of desire in light of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s postmodern philosophy of affect and becoming. While the critical interpretation of the play has tended to revolve around Blanche and Stanley’s conflict in terms of binary oppositions, their similarities―sexual and alcoholic indulgence, for instance―and the complexity of their characters challenge such a schematic reading. Inconsistent and often similar to each other, the characters of Streetcar are non-hierarchical and anti-essentialist entities―what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘desiring machines’―whose differences are only a matter of degree or intensity. Driven by desire, they affect and are affected by each other while making new connections and reconstituting old ones as they become something else. Rather than dramatizing a clash between different individual beings and the destructive consequences of desire, Streetcar is a play of becoming that attests to the productive and revolutionary potential of desire. Blanche’s relations with the other characters ultimately lead to the deterritorialization of the French Quarter and destabilize old ties that kept them dependent on or even subject to others. In this respect, the play celebrates body’s infinite potential to affect and be affected and produce real consequence as a play of anti-fascism. The play’s politics of becoming, evinced by Williams’ nuanced portrayal of the characters, challenges us to imagine new possibilities of identity and relationship in postmodernity.

keyword : A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams, Deleuze and Guattari, becoming, affect

This article examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s epistolary travelogue Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) in the context of conjectural history. By illustrating how she borrows the methodology of conjectural history to trace the improvement of manners in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, the article analyzes the utopia (or dys-topia) Wollstonecraft imagines based on the social progress she observes during her northern travels. It demonstrates that despite her initial faith in human industry and economic prosperity as the driving forces behind civilization, Wollstonecraft later expresses grave reservations about the “future improvement of the world” by drawing attention to the harmful effects that commerce can bring to societies. It suggests that such concerns largely derive from her status as a female traveler who does not enjoy the privileges of the leisured male traveler and is therefore in a more favorable position to reflect on the conditions of the socially disenfranchised such as women and the laboring poor. By exploring how Wollstonecraft’s unstable status leads her to critically examine stadial theory and use various criteria in assessing a nation’s state of civilization, the article examines how she ultimately envisions the world as a “vast prison” in her travel narrative, thereby anticipating the pessimistic turn in her political vision and later writings.

keyword : Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, travel narrative, conjectural history, social utopia

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) kindled debates on 9/11 discourse by providing a third-world perspective on the historical tragedy. While centering on postcolonial and international complications surrounding 9/11, Hamid addresses homosexual and racial identity in the text. Based on existing scholarship reading the text as postcolonial resistance, this essay aims to expand our view of 9/11 narratives by analyzing homosexual politics in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which has barely been recognized by scholars. This essay examines, on the one hand, the mentor-mentee relationship between the closeted gay character Jim and Pakistani immigrant Changez (hearkening back to Greek customs of homosexuality), and, on the other hand, it looks at their mentorship as situated within postcolonial discussions concerning the effeminization of Asia and the assimilation process within a diaspora. Approaching the novel as an American dream narrative reveals an underlying anxiety about American society’s rejection about Others as well as of homosexuality. This essay argues that The Reluctant Fundamentalist critiques a white nationalist discourse after 9/11 in which orientalist impulses supersede homophobia, excluding racial others and integrating white homosexuals as patriotic members.

keyword : 9/11 narratives, American dream, mentorship, homosexuality, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The advent of cinema at the dawn of the twentieth century profoundly ruptured the nineteenth-century notion of spectatorship as a constituent of bourgeois male subjectivity by allowing marginalized social groups such as working-class women, child vagrants, and rural people to have access to a new public sphere. This paper focuses on the British modernist writer Dorothy Richardson’s film writing, which appeared in the avant-garde literary magazine Close Up (1927-1933), to show how the silent cinema spectatorship in the 1920s challenged gendered, class-bound notions of spectatorship. In particular, this paper explores the representation of spec-tatorial practices in her film writing and the ramifications of a particular mode of perception she valorizes: contemplation. Throughout the column she wrote for Close Up, Richardson, writing from the perspective of one of the spectators seated in a movie theatre, committed herself to theorizing spectator subjectivity in the early sound era. By taking up a position similar to that of the nineteenth-century male urban investigator, Richardson revises the dominant imaginative mappings of London through her discussion of the spaces of the movie theaters and the demographic makeup of the cinema audience. Challenging dominant views on cinematic perception, Richardson associates absorptive, contemplative modes of perception with plebeian spectatorship to highlight the cinema’s therapeutic, emancipatory function for the underprivileged. Richardson also contends that silent films, when accompanied by simple piano music and performed in a small, garage-like movie theater, should be the norm to secure and nurture contemplation.

keyword : Dorothy Richardson, Close Up, silent film, spectatorship, contemplation

The fast-shifting material condition we are living in―one that is increasingly technologically mediated―demands a new way of reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). In conversation with posthumanist thinkers and with a handful of ‘big’ thinkers of our time, this essay proposes two things. Primarily, I seek to reread Shelley’s speculative fiction in light of the current theoretical debates on posthumanism. But it is not my intention to forgo the historical specificity of Frankenstein. Rather, this essay stands on the meaningful intersections of Romantic life science, eighteenth-century aesthetic discourses, and posthumanist concerns. I argue that Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein draws the narrative arc of posthumanist fiction, for the novel attests to the possibility of distinctly nonhuman cognitive developments while reckoning with its agential power. To that end, this essay examines the Creature’s language acquisition, his discernment of beauty, sympathy, and benevolence, and eventually his request for a female companion. These facets are the key tenors that altogether illustrate cognitive power of the tentatively nonhuman. More importantly, perhaps nothing can better illustrate a nexus of fraught emotions that attend to the making of and cohabiting with the nonhuman―repulse, anxiety, and fear―than the interactions between Frankenstein and the Creature. The pseudo father-and-son relationship nicely anticipates our very twenty-first-century unease toward the kind of nonhuman characterized by augmented physicality and enhanced cognitive capabilities that might match or surpass humans.

keyword : cognitive capabilities, Frankenstein, nonhuman intelligence, vitality, Mary Shelley