Robert T. Tally Jr.

DOI: Vol.65(No.3) 391-408, 2019

Scholars have long examined the relationship between literature and space, place, or mapping, but formal methods or disciplines for such work have only recently come into being. Particularly after what has been called the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences, researchers from various academic and artistic disciplines have developed work in connection to such terms as literary geography, imaginative geography, geocriticism, geopoetics, the spatial humanities, geohumanities, and spatial literary studies, to name a few. Understandably, there would be a great deal of overlapping interest among these emerging practices or subfields, even if the aims and methods of each may vary, and practitioners of one form may find it desirable to distinguish their field from other related ones. Recently, a leading proponent of literary geography has sharply criticized the conflation of that field with spatial literary studies, an ostensible rival primarily associated with the work of Robert T. Tally Jr., among others. In this essay, Tally responds to this criticism, first by explaining his use and understanding of the terms spatial literary studies and literary geography, then by attempting to create a working definition that would delineate the boundaries between these practices while leaving open the possibilities for future collaboration and mutual influence.

Spatiality, literary geography, geocriticism, critical theory, interdisciplinarity

Joff P. N. Bradley

DOI: Vol.65(No.3) 409-424, 2019

This paper revisits the question of desire and the desire for social transformation in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy through the figure of the angel. It compares several imaginations around the figure of the angel in divergent intellectual histories before offering a re-interpretation of an image of thought found in Guattari’s sole work namely the scarecrow. The paper examines Paul Klee’s angelology to invoke the Angelus Militans (the Militant Angel) as a rival to both Walter Benjamin’s understanding of Angelus Novus (New Angel) and Gillian Rose’s affirmation of Klee’s Angelus Dubiosus (Doubting Angel). The paper considers the contemporary relevance of the figure of the schizo in terms of Klee’s Angelus Militans to ask: Is the figure of the schizo trapped in another bygone age, left anachronistic and exhausted? I am arguing that the three angels―Novus, Dubiosus and Militans―and Deleuze and Guattari’s exterminating angel all suffer a form of trauma or anxiety; they are in effect pulverized and petrified. All of the angels are without a path to utopia. Heralding Guattari’s warning, the angels seem to be caught in a vertiginous whirlwind, the vertigo of abolition; they are thrown into a maelstrom of self-directed destruction. While Guattari’s scarecrow is a perfectly miserable description of where we are in the contemporary moment it is nevertheless a figure which portends the future image of philosophy and future imaginary of utopia.

schizoanalysis, Gillian Rose, Deleuze and Guattari, Paul Klee, angels

Ira Nadel

DOI: Vol.65(No.3) 425-440, 2019

One of the more unexpected literary associations is that between Philip Roth and Bruce Springsteen yet a reading of Springsteen’s 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, reveals surprising stylistic and personal connections linking the two New Jersey-born artists. It begins with a shared artistic practice and the importance of discontent, if not anger, as a catalyst for their writing. Both are also disciplined performers committed to their work who developed similar methods that enhanced their writing, whether a novel or song. The influence of fathers and their parallel attitudes toward love relationships provides another point of intersection. An additional similarity is that in their late careers, they both consider mortality, the overriding feature of Roth’s last five novels, from Exit Ghost through to Nemesis, which Springsteen’s late albums and recent Broadway show exhibit. The “late style,”associated with a more focused and in some cases minimalist method, inhabits the work of both artists: Roth moved from the energetic and elaborate method of Operation Shylock or Sabbath’s Theatre to the more restrained Everyman or Nemesis. Springsteen moved from the raucous sound of the E Street Band to solo performances and a quieter sound. Place and its recreation is another singular feature of both writers, for Springsteen Asbury Park and Freehold, NJ, for Roth, Newark, NJ. That Roth read and admired Springsteen’s autobiography enriches their connections defined in part by the emergence of a shared “Jersey Style.”

Roth, Springsteen, performance, fathers, reception

Ivan Canadas

DOI: Vol.65(No.3) 441-453, 2019

This paper examines “Merciless Gods” (2014) by Australian writer- Christos Tsiolkas, whose novels include Loaded (1995), Dead Europe (2005), The Slap (2008) and Barracuda (2013), all since adapted for film or television. Tsiolkas’ fiction delves into contemporary social issues, often in an urban or suburban Australian setting, withcharacters who often reflect Tsiolkas’ own homosexual identity and his upbringing in ethnically-diverse Melbourne. A complex narrative, “Merciless Gods” questions our world’s capacity to preserve social cohesion in the face of inequality andself-absorption. As an unnamed narrator recalls a confessional party game which unfolded among old friends, his framework of successive narratives leads to a climactic revelation which shattered the group’s unity and left each friend individually, personally, shaken after one of them, Vince, claimed to have committed a horridcrime in a remote, foreign land. However, intellectual games of abjection, sublimation, sacrifice and redemption―and, conversely, condemnation and ostracism―arguably reveal the monster among the innocent as art’s Gnostic savior, suggesting that Vince and the unnamed narrator are an ironic, dualistic projection of Tsiolkas himself― a willing scapegoat, sacrificing self for his friends’, and readers’, moral purification.

Christos Tsiolkas, “Merciless Gods,” gnostic, sexuality, abject

Robert Grotjohn

DOI: Vol.65(No.3) 455-475, 2019

This essay considers Don Mee Choi’s The Morning News Is Exciting and maps several lines between Choi’s work and that of other poets in the community that Anna Maria Hong calls “KAFP” (Korean American Feminist Poetry / Poets), particularly Jiyoon Lee’s Foreigners Folly and Eunsong Kim’s Gospel of Regicide. The analysis builds from the influence of a Deleuzian “rhizomatic” reading strategy and Myung Mi Kim’s fundamental questions of deterritorialization: “What is English now, in the face of mass global migration? How to practice and make plural the written and spoken―grammar, syntaxes, textures, intonations ...” Choi, Lee, and Eunsong Kim write in the deterritorialized space of those ellipses by resisting what Deleuze and Guattari call the “order-words” of neocolonial “grammaticality.” In various temporal and linguistic disruptions, Choi interrogates the neocolonial relationship between the U.S. and South Korea. That interrogation shows rhizomatic lines extending to the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as well as Myung Mi Kim. Choi disorders the connections she sees between military and sexual violence, sometimes with the intertextual aid of Emily Dickinson. Lee creates a persona of “foreignwoman” who is at first cowed by but finally performs a brutal turnabout on “Native speaker,” whom she first encounters as the voice on an EFL cassette. Eunsong Kim resists the order-words of both whiteness and her neo-Confucian ethnic heritage, finding liberation in a traitorous gospel. The exploration of these three poets opens to a brief reflection on the diverse, expanding community of KAFP that defies the grammaticality, political and linguistic, of Standard Englishes and their patriarchal orders.

Korean American Feminist Poetry, Don Mee Choi, Jiyoon Lee, Eunsong Kim, Deleuze and Guattari

Seung Hyun Hong

DOI: Vol.65(No.3) 477-505, 2019

Both Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster realize the instability of signifier from the ambiguity and contradiction. A similar complexity characterizes Lord Jim and A Passage to India because both writers have recourse to chaos to enable them to exemplify a complex modernist narrative form. The constant wavering, sliding narrative of modernist text, in fact, does not nail down words to a fixed meaning. What I wish to explore here is how the coiling uncoiling complexity of their narrative method expresses the instability of contradiction which keeps evoking the mystical abyss. The first part of my argument will briefly elucidate the narrative tact and structure of both novels. The second part will be concerned with an exploration of the crucial idea of contradiction which is the reservoir of mysticism. Finally, I will attempt to elaborate the ambiguous meaning which underlies the writers’ anticipation of the harmony and synthesis in chapters 36-45 in Lord Jim and the last section in A Passage to India. The two modernist writers have tried to deflate in many ways the certainty and fixed meaning through the use of multiplicities. Their efforts present every nuance of the novel, represented by such examples as self-testing narrative, whimsical quick reversals, or subversions of meaning, and open-endedness of the novel. Like a postmodern slipperiness of language, their texts are, in a certain sense, enigmatic, and as richly ambiguous as they are innovative in form.

Conrad, Forster, Modernism, contradiction, multi-perspectivism

Seogkwang Lee

DOI: Vol.65(No.3) 507-522, 2019

This essay analyses William Shakespeare’s works, Hamlet and King Lear, in view of Levinas’s philosophies on death in order to precipitate further insight into the playwright’s meditations on death. A particular attention in each play is paid on Hamlet’s gradual shift in understanding of the nature of death and awareness of what occurs in the complex fluctuation of death occurring before dying and in dying particularly in his encounter with death in the graveyard where he notices that death is hanging around, not remote but looming, and its advent is something beyond his control; also on the theatrical effects of scenes in King Lear regarding Gloucester’s suicidal act not entirely mocked by his son, Edgar but led to a will to live, and Lear’s demise holding the death of his beloved but misjudged daughter, Cordelia where audience’s look on death is shifting towards the theatrical multidimensional view. In doing so, this paper reveals a consideration of death as lingering, looming and uncontrollable. To the audience, death is something that already has happened and become impersonal and general. What is more, death continues as life goes on; death and life seen as relational. Shakespeare claims in this regard, “readiness is all”(5.2.160). This view demands the reader to review the aspect death as such to become compassionate and to see boundary between life and death blurred. Such death is seen to exist near at hand and is not empty, for within it, the self continues rather than being annihilated.

Readiness, Death, Lingering, Annihilation, Moral

Meeyoung Kang

DOI: Vol.65(No.3) 523-541, 2019

Beyond the antithetical distinction between modernist and realist approaches on Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” I elucidate how the two seemingly incompatible perspectives interrelate, enacting the aesthetic of distraction. Modernist narratology intertwined with brevity and allusive implication of the form of short fiction along with feminist violation of patriarchal language draws upon the aesthetics of distraction by sequencing contradictory modes of reception and faculties of discursive and sensuous entities. This illustrates how Melanctha distributes a patriarchal discursive self on one side and drawing on sensuous images of women’s desire on the other. To reify the contradictory conglomeration, I classify “Melanctha” as a feminist tragic short fiction, situating it at the intersection of traditional tragedy and modern feminist short fiction. Within the classification, “Melanctha” continuously has its generic boundaries blurred and ultimately expanded by incorporating contradictory perceptions and sensibilities, deviating from readers’ expectation for genre, language, and woman. As a result, the authority of tragic tradition is replaced by new perceptions brought about by the shock effect which is derived from the deviated expectations and archetypes, leading to experimental language as well. The newly offered perception through distraction and epiphany renders the stories political in that it produces and disseminates the perceptible that was once imperceptible. Reinforced by the density of the form of short story and counter-ideological resistance, the moment of epiphany in “Melanctha” enacts literary politics.

Gertrude Stein`s “Melanctha,” short fiction, contradictory perceptions, Walter Benjamin`s Aesthetic of Distraction, Jacques Ranciere`s Literary politicization

Youmi Jung

DOI: Vol.65(No.3) 543-561, 2019

Aphra Behn’s dark and cynical comedy written and performed in 1681, The Rover Part II, features a prostitute-heroine ardently in love with a libertine rake-hero. One of the most celebrated and admired actresses of the time Elizabeth Barry played the prostitute-heroine La Nuche, jointly creating a new and sympathetic image for the prostitute character. This essay examines how Behn dramatizes a wider range of female desires and perspectives by capitalizing a pool of experienced actresses in the Duke’s Company including Elizabeth Barry. It then focuses on how Behn’s dramatic exploration of working-class women with libertine desires and lifestyle addresses issues unique to female libertines. While scholars have noted Behn’s critical examination of male libertinism in her plays, they have not paid much attention to female libertine characters. Prostitute-heroine La Nuche differs from typical romantic heroines because she is not bound by patriarchal control, but her constant and intense fear of poverty highlights her vulnerability as a woman who should make a living by exchanging her limited and temporary resource of beauty and youth. The play’s concluding libertine union between Willmore and La Nuche is also carefully orchestrated to underscore the complex web of situation in which La Nuche puts herself in and how such union can never offer a model alternative to marriage especially for women. As a play that explore the multifaceted problem of female sexual and libertine desire, The Rover Part II should be read as a black comedy that takes desiring women’s dilemma as its subject matter.

Aphra Behn, Libertine, Sexual Desire, Elizabeth Barry, Actress