In-Between: Children as Performers

Martin Jesse Klein

L ouis Gaston Labat was a pioneer in the world of regional anesthesia. In the early 20th century, he brought to the United States knowledge he had acquired from his mentor, the French surgery professor Victor Pauchet. Labat was one of the founders of the “original” American Society of Regional Anesthesia (1) and the author of Regional Anesthesia: Its Technic and Clinical Application (2), which was considered the definitive textbook on regional anesthesia for at least 30 yr after its publication. The text was one of the first English-language anesthesia books devoted to the practice of regional anesthesia and one of the most popular in the United States at the time. Labat’s book was noted to have a remarkable similarity (3) to Pauchet’s book L’Anesthesie Regionale (4). Yet, no clear comparison of Pauchet and Labat’s work, including both text and illustrations, has been done. Did Labat simply copy Pauchet’s work? Was Labat’s work original and simply an outgrowth of Pauchet’s? Was there some middle ground, where copied elements of Pauchet are noticeable, yet a new and distinctive set of ideas, Labat’s alone, emerged from the pages of Regional Anesthesia?

<i>Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance</i>, by John Haydock

Charles Brockden Brown (b. 1771–d. 1810), America’s first novelist, was born into a Philadelphia Quaker family and experienced all the tumult of the Revolutionary era. He attended the Friends Latin School and apprenticed at the law office of Alexander Wilcocks. He later joined a law society and a Belles Lettres Club, where he developed a love of debate. His growing disillusionment with the practice of law and his commitment to being the “champion of injustice” (Clark 1952, 31, cited under Contemporary Reviews) caused him to turn to teaching at the Friends Grammar School and, ultimately, to the pursuit of literary interests. Between 1793 and 1798, Brown read widely, finding himself attracted to ideas that inspired the French Revolution and to radical English Jacobin writers such as William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. His trips to New York City and his involvement with the Friendly Club, which included literary intellectuals such as William Dunlap, Timothy Dwight, Elihu Hubbard Smith, and William Johnson, were followed by a two-year stay in New York. Under these influences, in March 1798 he published Alcuin, a fictional dialogue on women’s rights and education. During this time, as the French Revolution spilled over into the Haitian Revolution, Brown composed and published seven novels (or “romances,” as he understood them) that variously use Gothic and sentimental elements: Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), Ormond; or The Secret Witness (1799), Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799–1800), Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (serialized 1799–1800), Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), Clara Howard; in a Series of Letters (1801), and Jane Talbot; a Novel (1801), as he pivoted toward political pamphlet writing, history writing, and periodical editing. He then edited and contributed to The Monthly Magazine and American Review (1799–1800) and The Literary Magazine and American Register (1803–1807), even as he published pamphlets on the Louisiana Purchase. In 1804 he married Elizabeth Linn, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, which led to his dismissal from the local denomination of Quakers. His editing of The American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Science (1807–1809) was accompanied by a political pamphlet critical of Jefferson’s Embargo in 1809. Brown died of tuberculosis in 1810 at the age of thirty-nine. Although regarded as a “genius” by Hawthorne and others, his reputation waned until Cold War literary critics highlighted the psychological dimensions of his novels. Eventually, beginning in the 1980s, the New Historicism and critical approaches that interrogated hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality, and nationhood displaced the aesthetic unity of the New Critics, which viewed Brown’s novels as having flawed plots and symbolism. Today, Brown’s letters, novels, poetry, political pamphlets, essays, historical sketches, and other writings are closely studied for their insights into Atlantic world culture, late Enlightenment progressive thinking, and the nexus of historical and fictional writing.

Instead of the disembodied abstraction that is typically the norm, I begin and end by remarking on my own embodiment as a white female scholar of popular culture reflecting on comics studies by reviewing four books written by white male scholars, all of whom make significant contributions in theorizing comics form. Queer theory teaches us to question the naturalization of norms, so while I observe that all four are male-authored texts that focus mostly on male characters, creators, and audiences, I do not assume bodies neatly match up with genders and sexualities. Instead, guided by queer of color critique, I emphasize each book’s contributions in theorizing heroism and comics form while asking whether and how they engage, illuminate, limit, or even refuse analysis of intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and nation as intertwining social constructions. Three are studies of male superheroes. The fourth, Bart Beaty’s Twelve-Cent Archie, explores a world organized around a male character who is the antithesis of a hero: Archie is “a young man to whom things happen; he is not someone who makes things happen” (16). Overall, I am struck by the significance of gender (especially masculinities), sexuality (especially heterosexuality), race (especially whiteness), and nation (especially the United States) for the objects, creators, collaborations, audiences, and industries under discussion. On the other hand, imagining female, feminist, and queer readers and readings of comics is largely foreclosed, while maleness and masculinities are often reified and underexplored as historical constructs, even in work that makes significant contributions.One of my guiding premises is that queer studies and especially queer of color critique have much to offer comics studies. As Siobhan Somerville (2014, 203) explains, queer since the 1980s functions both “as an umbrella term that refers to a range of sexual identities that are ‘not straight’” and as an analytic that “calls into question the stability of any such categories of identity based on sexual orientation,” thereby exposing the latter as constructions that “establish and police the line between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal.’” In addition to this guiding premise, I build on queer of color analysis modeled by scholars such as Roderick Ferguson, José Esteban Muñoz, and Fatima El-Tayeb, all of whom examine gender, race, sexuality, and nation as intertwining social constructions. Ferguson (2004, 149n1) defines queer of color critique as “a heterogeneous enterprise made up of women of color feminism, materialist analysis, poststructuralist theory, and queer critique” that interrogates such “social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices.” Ramzi Fawaz (2016, 32) further theorizes the post–World War II “superhero as a distinctly queer figure of twentieth-century popular culture” by approaching “popular fantasy and its political effects” from the perspective of queer theory, which “is a body of knowledge that concerns itself with the ways queer or non-normative figures generate alternative desires, bring into view unexpected objects of passionate attachment, and facilitate the production of novel forms of kinship and affiliation.” Although none of the books I discuss here draws much or at all on queer theory, all take up comics form in ways that both illuminate and swerve away from queer figures, alternative desires, unexpected objects of passionate attachment, and nonnormative social and sexual relations. The figure of the “little boy” as privileged subject and imagined reader and scenes of intergenerational transmission of comics among fathers, sons, and brothers also recur, suggesting that masculinities and relationships among men are central to almost all of these comics as well as the communities and networks that transmit their meanings.The story of Captain Marvel and his alter ego Billy Batson, Brian Cremins tells us, “starts with a kid and his books” (3)—namely an editor and writer for Fawcett Publications, Bill Parker, who as a boy read about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and later invented Captain Marvel. But Cremins focuses especially on cartoonist and critic C. C. Beck and writer Otto Binder as cocreators of “one of the best-selling characters of the 1940s” (8). By recovering Beck’s theories of comics form in fanzines, letters, and other archival sources, Cremins does valuable work situating Beck as a figure “like [Will] Eisner” whose “body of work remains one of the great achievements in twentieth-century comics in the United States” (9). Cremins also explores Binder’s career as a pulp science fiction writer and his invention of the animal character Mr. Tawny as his autobiographical surrogate. Here Cremins’s remarks on the importance of fantasy and on animals as expressions of “a shadow self, one hidden from the world” (51–52) suggest that animals can function as queer figures, as in Jack Halberstam’s (2011) work on animated animals. In a discussion of how Billy Batson’s black valet, Steamboat, remains fixed in place while Billy’s movement and mastery of spaces signal his heroism, Cremins also denaturalizes racial categories and explicitly names white supremacy as a problem. He foregrounds as exemplary the story of Steamboat’s removal after objections from New York City junior high school students in the local Youthbuilders program. “If the form is as flexible and promising” as Eisner and Beck believed, Cremins argues, then it also “offers the means and opportunity” (103) to subvert racial stereotypes. Drawing on work in literature, psychology, and memory studies as well as fanzines, he examines relationships among the “medium of comics, the lure of nostalgia, and the art of memory” (4).Cremins concentrates especially on Billy as “a fiction of lost innocence, a marker of the idealized notions of boyhood and masculinity in America in the 1940s” (56). He assumes the comic targeted boy readers (and, during World War II, soldiers) who found appealing the story’s fantasy of “sheltered innocence” (75). Cremins also analyzes the comic as an extension of the boys’ adventure genre, which goes back to the nineteenth-century dime novel, when white boy adventurers, often accompanied by a subordinate person of color, explored exotic, often racialized spaces far from home (see Saxton 1991 and Streeby 2002). While boys and masculinity are the main focus of this study, Cremins dedicates it to his grandmother and cites cartoonist Trina Robbins’s memories of her “childhood discovery” of Captain Marvel, Billy, and most significantly Captain Marvel’s sister Mary as a “pretty major inspiration” for her own career (quoted on 13). Cremins’s brief mention of fanzines publishing photos of children in Mary Marvel costumes made me wonder about girl fans, as did Beck’s remark in a footnote about how much his daughter and granddaughter enjoyed the series. At the end, Cremins analyzes a 1981 photograph of himself, surrounded by other “white middle-class boys” (148) and wearing a Shazam! T-shirt with an image from the Captain Marvel–inspired Saturday morning cartoon. With no memory of its origins, he speculates about the significance of wearing a T-shirt “with a character created for children in the 1940s” and concludes “the weight of nostalgia is literal,” for the boys had “inherited a nostalgia for the popular heroes of the generations that preceded us” (149) even though the author did not read the original comics until much later.In Paul Young’s monograph on Miller’s Daredevil, on the other hand, the author centers his own responses as a twelve-year-old boy and teenage fan, which he, unlike Cremins, remembers very vividly, even describing his study as a “masochistic project” and an “exorcism” (18, 20). Starting with the question, “Why did Miller’s Daredevil blow my twelve-year-old mind?” (5), Young admits he still fears that writing a book will not “purge” either “the images or the rotating feelings of attraction and apprehension they inspire” (9). As “wretched” as he finds Miller’s gender politics especially, he is “still haunted by what those images showed me and what they meant to me beyond what they depicted” (10). In a dialogue between Young as a boy and his older self, he explores the “hold” the comic exerted on his imagination in order to “shed some light” on Miller’s success “and what that success meant for the discourse of superhero comics past, present, and future” (10). Throughout, Young frequently refers to his past as a minister’s son growing up in small-town southern Iowa, foregrounding his and his brother’s responses to comics, which continue today in their biweekly podcast, To the Batpoles! Along the way, Young also shows how Miller helped lead the creators’ rights movement and contributed to the “mainstreaming of superhero comic books beyond their traditional market of children and lifelong fans” through “grim, violent, and/or erotic ‘adult’ content and successful Hollywood franchises” (5). Miller did so, Young suggests, through a range of formal strategies, including breaking with 1940s superhero conventions of reverence for life and modeling “looser, cartoonier drawing styles and non-Code-approved violence” (210). Young contends that Miller used subtlety, irony, and complexity to muddy the good/evil binary of previous superhero comics and raise thought-provoking questions about the relationship between justice and the law. In each chapter, Young credits Miller with achieving a self-consciousness and formal complexity that expose “the act of creating comics” (72) and the conventions of the genre.Although Young incorporates insights from feminist film theory and at times addresses masculinity as a construct, I found myself a resisting reader when he moved from a particular, embodied, twelve-year-old, white-heterosexual-male “me” to a universalizing scholarly “we.” Toward the end, Young alludes to Miller’s saying, of 300’s Spartans and vigilante superheroes such as Batman, that maybe “cultures need guys like that”; Young further clarifies, “I do mean guys—the reckless male narcissists who can’t or won’t make subtle distinctions between good and evil—to do the dirty work of ‘preserving civilization as we know it’” (227). Clearly Young is criticizing the problem of reckless male narcissism and paternalistic investments in defending a racialized “civilization,” but when he says Miller “lets us sit with that ugly possibility” and “squirm at our own enjoyment and/or disgust” (227), I feel the force of my own disidentification, as Muñoz (1999) put it. Although many female readers undoubtedly enjoy Miller’s work, I am not part of the “us” who receives enjoyment, even if ambivalently mixed with disgust, from comics that explore whether white male narcissism is necessary or desirable to “civilization.” I suspect that gender, sexuality, race, and nation shape such enjoyment in ways that also merit analysis and that considering their intersections in the field of superhero comics might teach us something about the construction of masculinities and imagined relationships among men.Scott Bukatman also mentions his past as a young reader, but unlike Young he only started intensively reading Mike Mignola’s Hellboy as a Stanford professor with research funds available to purchase new Dark Horse oversize library editions of the comics, which originally debuted in 1993. Bukatman insists he was not “returned to the world of my childhood,” however, which he observes “isn’t a place I especially want to revisit anyway” (6). Although he includes a chapter on convergences of technique and materiality in children’s books and comics, he does not single out the figure of the boy reader, instead emphasizing how color can “provide a space apart that absorbs a reader” and “provides an antidote to pedantry” (99), enabling a “nonlinear mode of reading” (100). Bukatman suggests that Hellboy deviates from many other superhero comics in making its forensic detective protagonist “our surrogate” rather than “a figure of identification,” such that “our interest is deflected or dispersed into the world itself” (198). Bukatman also emphasizes Mignola’s “handmade ethos” (109) and “increasingly non-naturalistic” art, with its “refreshing attention to—and pushing of—the formal properties of the medium of comics” (9). Arguing that Mignola’s art is not strongly shaped by a realism primarily indebted to cinema and television (9), Bukatman turns to a variety of media, “children’s books especially, but also sculpture, pulp fiction, cinema, graphic design, painting, and medieval manuscripts” to “understand effects or possibilities in the medium of comics and to find vocabularies that will help articulate what it is that comics do” (10).For readers seeking to explore queer possibilities in this beautifully illustrated volume, Bukatman’s emphasis on Hellboy as “a comic steeped in the heretofore taboo genre of supernatural horror” (47) might be one place to start, since horror and the gothic are privileged genres in queer studies. The connections to Lovecraftian weird fiction and the occult detective could also open up questions about sexuality, gender, race, and nation, as could Bukatman’s comparison of Hellboy to James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking, who is “able to cross between civilization and destiny, retaining the morals of white culture while avoiding its decadence” (74). Hellboy’s resistance to following his destiny might be understood as a queer deviation: “Resisting one’s destiny is hard and lonely work—those horns can grow back” (77). Mignola’s fondness for “nonchronological stories and his use of nonlinear narrational devices” (181) might also be illuminated by recent work on queer time by Elizabeth Freeman, Halberstam, and others. Gender and sexuality are rarely the explicit focus, though openings pop up here and there, such as a footnote where Mignola explains that he felt he needed more female characters but “couldn’t draw” them since he was “terrible at drawing women” (227). Elsewhere, Mignola says he was surprised to discover that many of Hellboy’s fans are women and girls; it would be interesting to know more about audiences and to test the hypothesis that Mignola’s focus on nonnaturalistic elements that work in ways other than through identification may enable female and queer affiliations and pleasures.While the three books above focus on superheroes, Beaty’s Twelve-Cent Archie explores “one of the most lowbrow examples of a particularly lowbrow art form” (3): “nostalgic” and “completely out of fashion” Archie, whose comics sold millions of copies a month in the 1960s and early 1970s (4). Although Archie superhero comics were briefly introduced, they lasted only sixteen issues collectively. Beaty calls this a failed “experiment” (195) since “an action hero” is something Archie is not, for Archie is “a comic about nothing” (192). But Beaty argues that, far from being a defect, this everydayness was one of the comic’s great virtues: Archie was “the quintessential everyman—the typical American teen” (17) and Archie comics played with “the possibilities of everyday life in middle America, taken to certain logical or narrative extremes” (20). Beaty claims the greatness of Archie comics was inseparable from their nonliterary qualities as well as their attention to the quotidian. For instance, artist Harry Lucey was “one of the great masters of comic-book storytelling through body language” (21), known for “the amazing pliability of his characters and variety of their poses” (13), which supports Beaty’s claim that body language is another way comics are closer to the visual arts than to literature. Contending that “scholars have focused nearly exclusively on those works that can be most easily reconciled within the traditions of literary greatness . . . or those of contemporary cultural politics,” Beaty charges that such “cultural cherry-picking” leaves “enormous gaps in both the history and cultural analysis of comics” by excluding “the genuinely popular” (5) in the form of “children’s comics and humor comics.” These comics, he suggests, were “replete” with “self-referential formal play”: they included “wordless comics, metareferential comics, and avant-garde and abstract visual tendencies” (6). Thus Beaty hopes to right “the scholarly wrongs done to Archie” by “addressing the works as both typical and exceptional” during Lucey’s 1961–69 tenure as lead artist (6), works in which Beaty discovered “a level of complexity and interest that was totally unexpected.” The comics’ form—“their lack of continuity, their brevity, and their independent functioning within a larger narrative system”—contributed to that complexity, and Beaty especially praises “the efficacy and cogency of the interrelated short-story comics form as a significant alternative to graphic novels self-consciously modeled on literary parameters” (8). Indeed, one of the many pleasures of reading Twelve-Cent Archie is its exemplification of what we might call such a queer nonlinearity. Like the comics he studies, Beaty’s book is nonlinear and can be read in any order, while each of his chapters is “like every Archie story,” which can “exist independently of the rest” (7).Beaty addresses these comics’ queer potential most explicitly in his remarks on Jughead, who he suggests is asexual but whose “disdain for women” is often “read as a suggestion of queerness” (64). Beaty rejects such a reading since he finds no evidence that Jughead desires Archie and understands the couple instead as an “asexual male pairing” (65). If, however, we conceive of queerness not (only) as an identity but (also) as an analytic that denaturalizes socially and historically constructed identities, then a queer reading of Jughead’s asexuality is certainly possible. Instead, Beaty emphasizes how the male creators of Archie comics centered an asymmetrical on Archie, and thereby creating a that was for a male reader” so much so that is a between the success of Archie comics and the of of and He observes that is of and and are for color and and a range of male body while is only one female body At the he Archie comics were popular with a young female and speculates that the of and in that that Archie comics were a of female Beaty could enjoy and their since theories of reading” teach us that do not what they read while white were within stories created by Beaty the of characters in Archie comics, which the social of the rights Indeed, in the 1960s was a of white and where all could be on his own in Beaty observes that was for a white kid growing up in a of in the a of his own only Although Beaty the of in Archie comics, he their He the book by remarking on his enjoyment in his own who is the Beaty was when he read his the world of as I used to do” about female and the of Archie comics made me on my own reading I was in in Iowa, a that was then mostly though home to a significant of and that is about of where Young I as a Archie and comics after from around the then around the to read them my was Archie from to thereby the of Archie comics and in I was reading them at the of their I to they were so with the color, the art, and the I of their could them with could them up and them even when a and most of all their and could purchase them at the and many other in my to and I my to them for me at the they were and that might do it even though I had three brothers also for things and my had a hard time I moved on to and and had mostly lost interest in Archie by my As a twelve-year-old, I enjoyed the Shazam! television that preceded the Saturday morning animated on Cremins’s mostly lead was a often in and I was also to a Shazam! the superhero in the body of a female I Archie comics were and for a America that but like Beaty I Lucey’s art, and the meant were to the which me even though I like either As a white I as did but did not with was and I was by how were the for some weird which I would later as white a I was to the and alternative that included women in The and after through the of a local that sold and comics to By the time I to I had in with the independent comics that both in the local the from the in and in my of especially and which up science fiction, and all in one I especially the and since Lucey’s Archie comics were a major on my Archie In and about comics with a white man from one of my He with me how in a place he was as a by the male bodies and queer in the superhero comics I so I with this in order to suggest are still many possibilities for and queer figures, alternative desires, unexpected objects of passionate attachment, and queer and nonnormative affiliations and kinship even in comics created by white men and mostly at a white male in about form and heroism in comics studies are still many questions to about intersections of sexuality, gender, race, and Streeby is professor of studies and and of the at the of books World and American and the of of and the of through and of Streeby an on reading comics as fiction in and and is for with Ramzi Fawaz and

Dans le présent texte, l’auteure se penche sur le phénomène de la transgression omniprésente dans l’œuvre romanesque d’Ananda Devi. À partir de ses premiers romans jusqu’au dernier, l’écrivaine présente les personnages commettant une transgression. Cela concerne ses personnages féminins et masculins. Cependant, le lecteur évalue plutôt différemment le comportement des héros deviens par rapport à celui de ses héroïnes qui en général brisent des normes dans le cadre d’une révolte contre le diktat du patriarcat. Elles se transforment souvent de victime en bourreau L’objectif de cette analyse est de décrire différentes formes de transgressions, des plus légères aux plus graves. Dans son étude, l’auteure s’appuiera entre autres sur les travaux de G. Batailles et de M. Foucault.

MLR, 97.4, 2002 959 La 'Varietas'd la Renaissance: Actes de lajournee d'etude organiseepar I'Ecole nationale des Chartes (Paris, 27 avril 2000). Ed. by Dominique de Courcelles. (Etudes et rencontres de I'Ecole des Chartes, 9) Paris: Ecole des Chartes. 2001. 267 pp. 124.50 F; ?19. Of the ten essays in this volume, four are specifically concerned with texts in Latin (Raphaele Mouren on 'La varietas des philologues au xvie siecle: Entre varia lecta et variae lectiones', Jean-Marc Mandosio on Poliziano, Isabelle Diu and Alexandre Vanautgaerden on Erasmus's Adagia, Marie-Dominique Couzinet on Cardano and Bodin), three with Italian and/or Spanish writings (Giuseppe Grilli on Poggio and the Lazarillo, Paola Vassali on Equicola and Villalon, Dominique de Courcelles on John ofthe Cross's Cdntico espiritual), just one with French literature (Ulrich Langer on the (Euvres morales of Jean des Caurres, 1575), the other two being devoted to matters architectural (Yves Pauwels on ' Varietas et ordo en architecture: Lecture de l'antique et rhetorique de la creation') or musical (Frank Dobbins on 'La variete dans la musique de la Renaissance'). Although the collection suffers from defects common in this type of volume (no bibliography and no index), it manifestly reflects, by its very disparate nature, the theme that it develops: 'la notion de varietas apparait comme un principe majeur des formes de pensee, d'ecriture et de vie qui prevaudront jusqu'a l'age classique, comme l'ordonnateur de toute la culture humaniste' (p. 3). The concept is especially familiar to us through its relationship with the notions oivariatio, imitatio, and copia and other forms of creative transformation (as recently described, forexample, by Michel Jeanneret in his Perpetuum mobile: Metamorphoses des corps et des oeuvresde Vinci a Montaigne (Paris: Macula, 1997; see MLR, 94 (1999), 529-30), and carries within itsimilar tensions. The pursuit of'variety' is certainly an attempt to imitate nature and successful imitation therefore reflectsan overarching (but hidden) order, but this is achieved through processes of disorder at work both in formal expression and in the individualpursuing it('et lejugeant et le juge sont en continuelle mutation et branle', as Montaigne tells us). One ofthe most stimulating and suggestive items is that of Mouren (pp. 5-31) on the philologists' varietas as variant reading and their collections of variae lectiones (called thus by Muret, for example, but also annotationes, miscellanea, and later adversaria) which in themselves lead nowhere, but can ultimately serve as repositories to be exploited by others. For his part, Langer signals the prevalence of the notion of variety in later sixteenth-century moral works (Horace's famous bee image crops up most appositely here) before discussing the 'banquet de savoir heterogene' (p. 129) to which we are invited by Des Caurres. Specialists in the differentdisciplines we associate with 'Renaissance studies', 'qui ca, qui la, voletans a leur aise', will all find something of interest in this volume. University of Wales, Lampeter T. Peach Poetique de la Renaissance: Le Modele italien, le monde franco-bourguignon et leur heritage enFrance au XVle siecle. Ed. by Perrine Galand-Hallyn and Fernand Hallyn. Preface by Terence Cave. (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 348) Geneve: Droz. 2001. xvii +786 pp. 120 SwF. This is a work conceived on the grand scale, with the aim of throwing light on the evolution over two centuries of French Renaissance poetic theory from its classical, ltalian, and medieval French origins. It proceeds by studyingprimarily the successive formulations of theorists with differingperspectives, and secondarily ideas on poet? ics expressed in poetry itself. The editors have assembled an international team of fifteenscholars, from America as well as Europe, whose combined expertise enables ...

In the light of the increasing corporatisation of academic publishing in English, this paper draws on my experience of translating French critic Laurence Louppe's Poétique de la danse contemporaine (Brussels, 1997) into English (Dance Books, forthcoming 2010) to reflect cross-linguistically upon the need to maintain a diversity of linguistic perspectives and resources in dance commentary. Just as the dancer and the choreographer use each other to learn from the "translation" that their respective bodies and moves represent for each other, so the process of textual translation can provoke a more acute awareness of issues regarding the relationship between language and the complexities of dance experiences. Louppe emphasises that one of the insights of contemporary dance has been that "the body" is not simply a support for verbal language but can have its own, different, communicative modalities. In the light of this, Louppe's own literary poetics seeks in return to mine the etymological layers of her language – and to activate its anthropological roots in sensuous existence. My article discusses the conceptual resources upon which Louppe draws, including those drawn from the modern dance heritage, her own philosophical erudition and literary poetics, and the resources specific to the French language (as these emerge through my perspective from within English) in order to articulate issues of change, corporeality and mobility. This discussion is undertaken in relation to specific terminological and metaphorical examples and makes comparisons with the writings of Isadora Duncan.