David Bennett

DOI: Vol.63(No.1) 3-21, 2017

While neoliberalism has been penetrating the most intimate aspects of our lives with the logic of the `bottom line,` its cost-benefit analyses of human motivation have increasingly assumed `scientific` status, not least in the sphere of sexual psychology. Since the 1990s, a spate of studies by economists, sociologists and legal theorists has claimed to set our understanding of sexual desire on a “scientific” footing for the first time, by elaborating an “economics of sex” (Posner; Baumeister and Vohs; Blanchflower and Oswald; Hakim), which explains sexual psychology as a personal calculus of profit and loss, investment and return. Such studies invariably cite as their inspiration the economic theory of Gary Becker and his Chicago School colleagues, who launched hardcore neoliberal economics on the world in the 1960s with their concept of “human capital” and the universal mentality of homo oeconomicus. This paper challenges the assumption that it was only in the late twentieth century that economic models of mind and desire claimed scientific credibility. It examines how monetary metaphors and models have been deployed in theories of physiology and psychology since the Enlightenment, when vitalist medicine promulgated the idea of the “animal economy” or “vital economy,” and how the psychoanalytic tradition consolidated economic explanations of desire, energy and vitality in its theories of “libidinal economy.” The paper illustrates how powerful social and political movements have been based on monetary models of the mind-body since the eighteenth century, and it asks how neoliberalism`s dissemination of such models as “scientific” in our own era might be challenged.

desire, metaphor, libidinal economy, psychoanalysis, neoliberalism

Jim Holstun

DOI: Vol.63(No.1) 23-43, 2017

The proletarian novel is a fictional narrative that, from a particular proletarian perspective, totalizes the capitalist mode of production in movement. US literary critics tend to focus on American proletarian novels written during the Great Depression, from 1929 to 1941. In this essay, I focus on two proletarian Proletarian novels about postwar western New York: Connie Porter`s All-Bright Court (1992), about black steelworkers in Lackawanna, just south of Buffalo; and Leslie Feinberg`s Stone Butch Blues (1993), about romance, sexuality, and working life among Buffalo butch-femme lesbians. It is no accident that both novels focus on the 1970s crisis of deindustrialization, which hollowed out Buffalo steel, then the Buffalo economy as a whole. To address this new crisis, both repurpose the literary forms of proletarian fiction from the 1920s and 30s. Writing in the context of 1990s identity politics, with its relatively optimistic liberal narrative of progress regarding Afro-American civil rights and gay liberation, both novels articulate a more somber narrative of defeat and mixed success, amid the decline of the Afro-American and butch-femme working class. I conclude by emphasizing the international quality of proletarian fiction, looking briefly at two Korean novels: Cho Se-hui`s The Dwarf (1978) and Shin Kyung-Sook`s The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (1995). Despite the diametrically opposite economic situation (rapid industrialization under Korea`s authoritarian Yusin Constitution, not deindustrialization in a formally democratic state), they display remarkable similarities of form and content to the two Buffalo novels.

Connie Porter, Leslie Feinberg, Korean labor literature, proletarian novel, Buffalo NY

Denise Ming-yueh Wang

DOI: Vol.63(No.1) 45-61, 2017

Everyman is not a typical morality play as it lacks the broad humor of many morality plays that portray the vices as clowns that try to lure the Everyman figure away from salvation. What makes the play remarkable, undoubtedly, is the play`s economic language and concepts of wealth. Instead of humor, it is the play`s network of commercial lexicon that highlights the play`s distinction from other morality plays. Accordingly, this paper takes notice of the English writer`s use of the language of economy throughout two different systems of beliefs concerning wealth: the first is Everyman`s handling of his material goods, and the second is his debt to God. Our focus would be the language of purchase, of gift-giving, of lending, and of bookkeeping in Everyman so as to examine how the English dramatist makes use of the language of divine judgement and the language of trade to create the drama of Everyman`s reform and salvation. The key words, images and tropes are identical: reckoning and other commercial terms, account, the account book. This commercialism is in tension with the thesis of the play about worldly wealth, yet this is not surprising as medieval penitential manuals often use a commercial lexicon. But in Everyman, the divine economy operates in concert with the material economy so as to create the play`s larger structure of meaning: What should Everyman do with his money to save his soul? The moral of the play is interesting inasmuch as it insists that not God`s grace but charity works in the daily life are essential for salvation.

Everyman, Middle English drama, economy of salvation, Ars Moriendi, memento mori

Randy P. Schiff

DOI: Vol.63(No.1) 63-78, 2017

In the fourteenth-century Middle English poem Pearl, the narrator`s effort to ponder the singular nature of heavenly bliss is systematically undermined by economies of difference. While the object of the grieving narrator`s reflection has perennially inspired debate, all analysts recognize that the poem`s structuring relationship is presented in terms of economic competition: a jeweler-narrator judges the pearl as dearer than any other gem set for sale or gift to another. In the dream proper, the Pearl-poet channels spiritual debates grounded in the contrast between the dynamic multiplicity and fluidity of earthly economics with the static singularity of heavenly sublimity. The Pearl-poet deploys the Pearl-maiden as a spiritual authority who highlights the differentially distracted poet`s inability to hold fast to notions of oneness. The Pearl-poet generates a dream topography that mirrors the narrator`s limited perception: the jeweler imperfectly imagines the stable, because immaterial heaven upon which his economically destabilized eyes cannot focus. The multiple rivers of the poem elucidate how explicit efforts to focus on a single lost Pearl are undermined by the ways multiplicity haunts the desiring dreamer`s vision. The poet undermines the earth-heaven binary by toggling between a central river and multiple potential rivers, and thereby reflects on both the artistic nature of dreaming and the specificity of anxious Christian subjectivity. Such rivers are the internal dividing lines that reveal potential others for a dissociative, because earthly, mind that only imagines individuals within a fluid world of others.

Pearl, dream-vision, rivers, desire, identity

Walter S H Lim

DOI: Vol.63(No.1) 79-94, 2017

China`s economic development constitutes the thematic subject-matter of Taipei-born Malaysian author Tash Aw`s Five Star Billionaire (2013), a novel that portrays the (re)turn to China on the part of five Chinese characters from Malaysia. Focusing on the city of Shanghai as a symbol of the achievements and wealth of modern China, Aw revises the familiar narrative of the Chinese diasporic experience predicated on the movement from East Asia to the free West in search for the better life. In Aw`s novel, twenty-first century China beckons and entices as the land of promise for subjects of the historical Chinese diaspora. If Shanghai is the city of promise and possibilities, it does not, however, always deliver the good life, offering instead an impersonal and alienating social existence that must be negotiated by anyone who finds his or her way to the great metropolis. If, according to conventional wisdom, the twenty-first century will be economically dominated by China and the Asia-Pacific world, Five Star Billionaire imagines the possibilities of this new world order replete with all the problems that attend the pursuit of dreams and capital accumulation.

Malaysia, Shanghai, diaspora, capital, globalization

Eli Park Sorensen

DOI: Vol.63(No.1) 95-114, 2017

One of the consequences of the dominance of a poststructuralist-oriented vocabulary within Postcolonial Studies is that the field has had relatively little to say about literary realism, despite the fact that a considerable amount of postcolonial literature belongs to this tradition. I discuss some of the reasons behind this theoretical impasse, including Benedict Anderson`s canonical critique of literary realism, which he aligns with the homogenizing force of the national imaginary. The argument I pursue in this article―following Jonathan Culler`s critique―is that the novelistic dynamic Anderson identifies should be seen as less specifically related to the discourse of the national per se, and more connected to a certain basic dynamic pertaining to the idea of a political community, one that conditions but also precedes the possibility of a national discourse. I bring these ideas to a discussion of Rohinton Mistry`s A Fine Balance from 1995, in which the Schmittian distinction between friends and enemies plays a crucial role in terms of the novel`s portrayal of the historical event of the Emergency. I argue that the novel explores the ways in which biopolitics accompanies the national, ideological-interpellative narrative, and that the text`s realism should be seen as a symptom of a divided world (in which everyone, potentially, is an enemy), a nation at war with itself. Mistry`s text provides the framework within which we may understand the workings of the permanent state of emergency.

Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance, Nation, State of Emergency, Biopolitics

Jerry W. Ward

DOI: Vol.63(No.1) 115-128, 2017

Created in 1995 by Eugene B. Redmond in concert with the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club, the kwansaba is one of the more noteworthy fixed forms in contemporary poetry. Like haiku or the sonnet, the kwansaba imposes a stern discipline upon its practitioners. The definition is simple enough. A kwansaba is a poem “consisting of seven lines, of seven words each, with no word containing more than seven letters” (Redmond, Arkansippi Memwars 235). Redmond allows proper nouns, foreign terms, and quoted passages to be “exceptions to the seven letter rule” (235). When we consider that the rigid form of the kwansaba is historically linked to the invention of Kwanzaa, we might want to contemplate its interpretative possibilities in American cultural spaces. We can ask loaded questions about word games, poetry, and indeterminacy. We might ask whether kwansabas invite multi-layered interpretations which expose meaningful disconnection between “subjective” ethnic authenticity and delusions promoted by belief in the “objective” neutrality of formal or structural critical practice. Does the kwansaba encourage poets to maximize experiments in orality and defy efforts to minimize the power of language to denote or reveal ethnic identity? This paper explores those questions through multi-layered readings of Treasure Shield Redmond`s “justice,” Eugene B. Redmond`s “kwansaba: yo maya! yo day?” and Michael Castro`s “Kali-ma/Kwansaba for Jayne Cortez.”

discipline, history, Kwanzaa, kwansaba, interpretation

Hoon-sung Hwang

DOI: Vol.63(No.1) 129-146, 2017

This essay aims to revive and fortify Adorno`s life-long critique of the Enlightenment by establishing the subject of confrontation between man and nature. The interpretation of Endgame thus proceeds through an initial recourse to Adorno`s arguments that were pivoting around the epistemological problematics of relating the subject and the object. However, in order to fortify Adorno`s argument on the Enlightenment, I endeavor to make a theoretical detour and utilize Foucault`s notion of the modern episteme in conjunction with Heidegger`s conception of Technik. My textual analysis is thus based on Adorno`s argument concerning the evolution of Enlightenment reason and his conception of postmodern subjectivity. The upshot of my argument is that Endgame brilliantly illustrates the so called postmodern confrontation between man and nature in an allegorical form in the wake of the bankruptcy of Enlightenment reason. Endgame stages the vision of a new milestone at the boundary between the modern and the postmodern epistemes, where the protagonist suffers from schizophrenia, since he cannot legitimately posit his own perspective at the right center. As l`individu problematique entrapped at the faultline of the modern and postmodern episteme, Hamm and Clov are no less than faithful self-portraits of our postmodern people as Gogo and Didi, eternal wanderers in a strange world.

Samuel Beckett, Endgame, Theodor W. Adorno, Enlightenment reason, Postmodern subjectivity

Youngjeen Choe

DOI: Vol.63(No.1) 147-161, 2017

Francis Ford Coppola`s The Godfather (1972) is based upon the story of an Italian American crime group, the Corleone Family. On the one hand, its protagonists are basically outlaws, like the Prohibition-era gangster characters in the early 1930s` gangster films. They isolate themselves from moral values of society by making themselves forces of private justice. On the other hand, unlike the gangsters in the classic Hollywood cinema, their decisions and actions are based upon a code of honor for their family. Don Corleone, the boss of the family, is a typical example of this double characterization. While he is a ruthlessly powerful boss of the Sicilian Mafiosi, he is also a loving and caring father who wished his son to have a respectable life legitimated by the legal power. This double characterization provides an effect of re-interrogating the contradictions and conflicts of American society beyond the context of the traditional American myth. Furthermore, this thematic reconfiguration of the protagonist is embodied by Coppola`s stylistic revisionism from decoupage classique. The discreet camerawork for thematic development of the film includes zooming-in & out shots (opening scene and the scene of Michael`s decision for revenge after Sollozzo`s attack on his father), depth of field combined with soft focus (the bathroom scene in the restaurant), the two shot scene in Don Corleone`s conversation with Michael. This aesthetic achievement in Coppola`s camerawork has been indeed an unfathomable resource of creative freedom for both the New American Cinema of the 1970s and the current world cinema.

New American Cinema, outlaw, camera-consciousness, gazing subject, revisionism

Jina Moon

DOI: Vol.63(No.1) 163-180, 2017

In McTeague, Norris shows a shift of paradigm from the physical power-based to financial power-based society in nineteenth-century America. For the survival of fittest, people are required to be agile and adaptable to new circumstances. Men have to equip themselves with financial capability in order to achieve masculine and patriarchal authority. Women are put under more complicated conditions when they are empowered to be independent from men by earning money. If they intrude on the masculine realm with financial power, females are likely to be punished for infiltrating the long-standing sanctity of masculinity and patriarchy. Financial power earned through industrialization and capitalism endows its holder with masculine authority, which drives gender dynamics, debilitating traditional gender lines of masculinity and femininity. McTeague and Trina are the “missing links” that explain the transition from an agricultural society to an industrialized and capitalized economy. Although they contain features of the two societies, the protagonists clash in their struggle for survival in the new culture due to their unfitness to adapt successfully. Both McTeague and Trina fail to adjust to the new paradigm due to the heavy influence of traditional gender ideology of the time. They are not “the fittest” to move into the new economy of industrialization and capitalism. Falling behind the game of social selection, they degenerate to animal states, a predator and his prey. Physical violence is a brutal expression of masculinity that failed males adopt to compensate for their economic castration.

McTeague, Frank Norris, Domestic Violence, Nineteenth-Century America, Gender Reversal