Table of Contents
Vol.66  No.3  2020

The primary purpose of this essay is to survey early modern biopolitics represented in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. By looking back at the plague outbreak that happened a generation earlier, Defoe discusses the rise of the biopolitical state from an eighteenth-century perspective. During the middle ages and well into early modernity, the plague was seen as a sign of wonder and an expression of God’s exceptional intervention. However, Defoe’s narrator H.F. gradually secularizes this view and understands the plague as an issue of the city’s biopolitical control. This shift from a theocentric to a primarily biopolitical view is conterminous with the transformation captured by Michel Foucault’s concept of “governmentality.” In H.F.’s account, starting with the basic control of discourse and progressing to more extreme measures such as the shutting up of houses, everything is subject to the city’s biopolitical controls. H.F.’s understanding of the rise of a biopolitical state is, nonetheless, never clear enough as he maintains a certain ambiguity toward it. Critics have characterized Defoe’s narrator as unreliable, pointing out his self-contradictory perspective. I would argue, however, that H.F.’s antinomic accounts are derived not from his subjective instability or his failed recognition of reality; rather, they occur because he is fully aware of the “enigma” of biopower, which overlaps with the power to kill (thanatopower) when it is extremely developed. H.F.’s lesson is still useful today because it allows us to discuss human rights in the midst of a pandemic outbreak that requires extreme state controls.

keyword : Biopolitics, Thanatopolitics, The Plague, Disease Control, Human Rights

The purpose of this study is to discuss Muldoon’s “The More a Man Has, the More a Man Wants” in terms of the implosion in the Irish elegy tradition. The poem comprises two points of rupture-the speaker and the victim-through which the poet problematizes the tradition of Irish elegy. Muldoon’s speaker differs from the conventional elegiac speaker in two ways. First, the speaker is suspicious enough to partly recognize his surroundings in contrast to the traditional lyric speaker; furthermore, his trope of the personification enables him to deromanticize the tradition of pastoral elegiac mourning. Second, the speaker distinguishes himself from modern melancholic elegists. In distancing himself from both the dead and the sites of viloence, the poet employs black humor, which enables him to lighten the ethical burden of writing poetry during the Troubles and to express a sense of embarrassment in the turbulent era when a conventional distinction between good and evil is no longer valid. The second point of rupture is the victim. As a postmodern antihero, the victim appears self-contradictory. He behaves as an ordinary human; however, he appears as an extraordinary figure superior to common people. The self-contradictory characteristics accompanied by his transvestism and the use of shibboleth make him different from modern antiheroes. The postmodern antihero also problematizes the borders between representation and reality. In ekphrastic stanzas, he hybridizes different contexts in leaping from one representation to another to creatively interpret the contemporary sectarian violence, whereby the Irish elegiac genre implodes.

keyword : Muldoon, postmodern elegy, elegiac speaker, victim, postmodern antihero

Shelley’s poem “To A Skylark” has seen 200 years of popularity and interpretation since it was written in 1820. Different readings of it provide different interpretations and broaden the scope of critical treatment. A reading of the poem in light of Derridian deconstruction coupled with Lao Tzu’s philosophical thinking, produces interesting results. This essay attempts to re-read this classical poem by incorporating the philosophical insights of these two philosophers, one from ancient China and the other from the contemporary west. This attempt first generalizes deconstruction as an interpretation strategy for literature, focusing on the binary opposition in general and the binary opposition of “absence” and “presence” in particular. It then illustrates the dialectic thinking of Lao Tzu to pave the way for the study of the skylark in the poetic presentation. The essay maintains, after detailed analysis, that absence in the description of the physicality of the bird (as represented by the bird’s song and flight) is both external and internal to presence (as embodied by the physical being of the bird). By the poet’s artful incorporation of this strategy, he is able to express the greater “presence” of the bird, that which transcends corporeal existence; thus the poet accomplishes his poetic ideal, that is, that nature is more powerful than human beings and that the latter have to be humble before the power of nature as represented by the bird. The essay also holds that philosophers and the poet are alike in the discovery of the laws governing the universe, though in different ways.

keyword : Shelley, Derrida, Lao Tzu, presence, absence

This paper examines three narratives by Joseph Conrad in which the author deploys anarchist characters. The anarchists presented inThe Secret Agent are “shams” who do not attempt any performative anarchist act but instead merely recite abstract philosophies. One such sham, Verloc, leads Stevie to bomb himself instead of the Observatory in a conspiracy to warn the British police against the anarchist movement. In the aftermath of the inadvertent self-destruction of Stevie, his devoted sister murders Verloc and then commits suicide. Such acts of “madness and despair,” induced by the fraudulent anarchist, do not change the world but destroy the fanatics themselves. Similarly, in Conrad’s “The Informer,” the fake anarchist informer turns out to be a fanatic who sacrifices himself for the “amateur” Lady Anarchist. It seems ironic that Mr. X (who criticizes the lady for pretending to be an anarchist with “gestures of revolutionary convictions”) also belongs to the upper class. Both the lady and X are imposters who again contribute to the destruction of the fanatic. Finally, Conrad’s “An Anarchist” narrates the “gullibility” of a working-class man. Situated on a penal island, the protagonist meets those anarchists who lured him into the movement, and he kills them in a rage, in order to be free from their influence. This act of violence leads to dire consequences, and it seems that Conrad’s excavations of anarchy are not only prescient, but serve as a warning. Conrad’s tales of anarchists reveal that the shams, rather than the fanatics, are destructive, particularly to the fanatic or fanatically disposed.

keyword : Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, “The Informer, ” “An Anarchist, ” sham

Beginning with András Visky’s seminal essay “In Search of a Lost Reality,” this article uncovers important insights for a 21st century understanding of theatre’s role in human culture. Moving from Visky’s essay to his Juliet and another play by Pamela Gien’s The Syringa Tree, this article locates the features of drama which correspond to Visky’s dramaturgy, and bids us understand some ethical implications of theatre. These ethics spring directly from the use of absurdist language, gesture, and the hope for theatre’s role in allowing communities to respond to violence, both political and personal. A comparison to Gien demonstrates that Visky’s dramatic approach is applicable even to plays which may, in their textual presentation, appear very different from Visky’s own, suggesting that the task of theatre envisioned by Visky applies beyond Visky’s own oeuvre. Whereas Visky as a dramaturg invites and calls actors to use gesture as a tool for enacting the ethic of theatre, Gien implies an agreement with Visky not only in her staged collaborations, but also in the textual directions for gesture which she provides in the play script itself. The comparison reveals theatre as a site for audience members to re-examine traumas within their own cultural memory and practice, whilst avoiding the worst tendencies of conscious self-victimisation. Finally, the essay briefly points to new work in the cognitive humanities which corroborates Visky’s stated aims and solidifies the claim that Visky’s theatrical ethic helps to deepen our understanding of theatre as a site of historical and political catharsis.

keyword : Visky, Gien, Gesture, Dramaturgy, Ethics

While Little Women (1880) has garnered serious critical attention, scholars have consistently framed Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870) as a minor work. In problematizing previous feminist approaches to Alcott’s oeuvre, this essay casts an analytical gaze toward marginalized males within the text, and explores how Polly Milton’s maternal power overshadows a selection of male characters in Alcott’s novel. Specifically, I argue that Mr. Sydney (as a genteel aristocrat) and Tom Shaw (as a contemptible boy) represent culturally marginalized masculinities, at odds within discourses of (male) exceptionalism and the self-made man at large across industrializing nineteenth- century North America. In discussing these specific male characters’ inconsequential masculinities, as read alongside Alcott’s presentation of Polly as an empowered female character, I reformulate Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of the triangular relationship, expressed in Between Men, in which a woman is exchanged between males as a kind of property. By presenting Polly’s outright rejection of a female role, I speculate that Alcott twists gender inequalities. Reading Alcott’s characters as an inversion of Sedgwick’s triangulation, this paper asserts that it is the female character, Polly, who takes advantage of males (Mr. Sydney and Tom). These are marginalized masculinities who become invisible while Polly is presented as both powerful and, therein, highly visible.

keyword : Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Female Empowerment, Marginalized Masculinity, Nineteenth-century America

This paper traces W. S. Merwin’s representations of silence as a source of communicative power, with a focus toward his later poems (published after 2000). These poems, especially those in The Shadow of Sirius (2009), often depict what Walter Benjamin would call pure language: linguistic form that generates the power of communication by virtue of its silence or ineffability. Merwin registers this negative productivity of language in the Benjaminian sense when he describes a primary linguistic entity that founds speech without being spoken―such as a sigh, in “Utterance,” ancient words, in “To the Words,” “one long syllable” in “Glassy Sea,” and “the first sound” in “The Long and the Short of It.” Further, Merwin’s poems in Sirius seem to investigate language’s originary relationship with silence by employing recurring motifs such as the trace of a song and the sounds of silence thereafter. In “Grace Note,” “Calling a Distant Animal,” “The Laughing Thrush,” and other poems in this collection, Merwin portrays vanishing sounds that seem to also empower speech. Silence in his later poetry can be read not so much as a negative phenomenon indicating the limits of language or the abyss of subjectivity, as some critics have previously suggested. This paper takes an alternative view, and argues that Merwin’s silence instead entails a dialectic of absence and presence, negativity and productivity, because it embodies a pure linguistic form that enables words to mean something by lacking meaning in themselves. In short, Merwin’s silence can be read as constituting the communicable essence of language.

keyword : W, S, Merwin, Benjamin, language, silence, trace

Audre Lorde’s Zami (1982) is an autobiographical novel in which the author draws extensively on her life experiences as an African American lesbian writer. Due to the autobiographical dimensions within the work, scholars have previously critiqued Zami as a genre text, reading the book specifically as a female memoir, a lesbian novel, a queer coming- out Bildungsroman, a slave narrative or, broadly, a novel of black feminism. Beyond these conventional approaches, this essay instead focuses on some of the ways in which Lorde’s personal experiences and memories are comprehensively shifted into larger rubrics (cultural, political) in both realistic and abstract styles. Taking a poststructuralist approach to language and the world on one side, while identifying ancestral, cultural, and mythic strata on the other, Lorde violates any so-called conventional form of autobiography. Read in these critical contexts, Zami can be critiqued as a counter-narrative actively transgressing a suite of oppressions. This is no simple autobiography, and at the intersection of conflicting forces, there appears her relationship with her mother, a connection which serves as a symbolic nexus wherein the personal and the collective are combined. When read through an autoethnographic lens, ostensibly contradictory impulses are reconciled: Zami stages and codifies narratives of both oppression and liberation.

keyword : Audre Lorde, Zami, Autoethnography, Black lesbian writer