Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist by Michael Germana

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The "new liberalism" is Thomas Hill Schaub's term for the dominant American intellectual discourse of the 1940s and 1950s, which encompassed the work of the largely Southern and conservative New Critics (Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, et al.) as well as that of their frequent rivals, the left-leaning New York Intellectuals (Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, et al.). Schaub describes the "new liberal narrative" as a story of "chastened liberalism" that explains the transitions from 1930s radicalism to the "realism" of the following decades (vii–ix). Schaub offers a reading of Invisible Man that "work[s] against the novel's universalism," but he ultimately critiques the novel for its apparently universalizing ending: "Though only thirteen years separate the collective 'we' that Steinbeck's Okies learn … from the plural 'you' that is the last word of Invisible Man, in the discourse of the new liberalism that circulates through Ellison's novel solidarity has become universality, and class conflict an expression of moral contradiction shared equally by all" (115). Daryl Michael Scott argues that the ending of the novel undercuts an otherwise consistent critique of the psychological "damage" inflicted on black people by racism. Playing on Ellison's famous critique of Richard Wright in "The World and the Jug," published in Shadow and Act (Citation1964), Scott writes, "At the end of the novel, Ellison's protagonist triumphed and regained his identity. Revealingly, the now visible man developed a positive individual identity, not a strong group identity. …Ellison could imagine the Invisible Man, but the Invisible Man could not imagine Ralph Ellison. Ellison saw to that" (168). See Bone, Bellow, Howe, and Lewis, for early versions of this critique. See Callahan, Foley, O'Meally, Roberts, and Stanford for recent versions. This recent approach is summed up well by Michael Nowlin, who argues that Invisible Man "speak[s] to the racial blindness of the liberal imagination while issuing from within its formal insistence on sustaining dialectical tension" (130). Also see Singh 55–56, 104–16, 122–23, 130–31, 152–55; Ferguson 54–81; and Kenneth Warren 1–25. For precursors to these recent reappraisals also see Baker, who distinguished the blues-influenced maneuverings of Ellison's work from his public pronouncements on aesthetics and culture in 1982, and Neal, who revised the Black Arts critique of Invisible Man in 1970. For salient exceptions, see Elizabeth Flynn and Patrocinio Schweickart's recent volume, Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response (Citation2004), especially James Phelan's "Reading Across Identity Borders: A Rhetorical Analysis of John Edgar Wideman's 'Doc's Story,'" Angeletta KM Gourdine's "Colored Readings; or Interpretation and the Raciogendered Body," and David Bleich's "What Literature is 'Ours'?" Also see Wyatt; Spivak, Death; Rabinowitz; and Fish. "New Critical preconceptions and procedures—born in the second third of the twentieth century—still govern a great deal of literary pedagogy and critical practice, as a glance at most 'introductions to literature' will quickly reveal" (Attridge 12). Also see Graff 10–11; Newfield 159–64; and Rabinowitz 4–5, 211–12. See Morrison 1–29. On the racism of universalist ideologies, see Etienne Balibar's influential "Racism as Universalism" (Citation1994). Also see Doris Sommer's discussion of "universalism" as a problematic rubric of literary evaluation and of "particularism" as a defensive literary strategy (1–31). This is a favored term for pre-eminent New Critics Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, who explain in their 1943 "Letter to the Teacher" (part of the introductory material to their textbook, Understanding Fiction) ways of managing the "failure of introspection" that can lead to faulty literary appraisals on the part of students (xii). Brooks and Warren present literary pedagogy as a kind of psychoanalytic treatment: good reading practices are self-revealing and, ultimately, self-cohering. Furthermore, literature that fails to strike a chord of unity within its reader reveals incomplete humanity on the part of both the author and the reader who enjoys such a work. This practice is also related to New Critical formal assumptions, such as the heightened value placed on opening and final statements (Rabinowitz xi). This is in itself a radical transgression of racial regimes of "representation," which govern who can speak for whom politically and aesthetically. Roberts argues that Ellison's transgressive presumption that the Invisible Man could speak for white people is prefigured, in his oeuvre, by the authorial "passing" at work in the short story, "A Party Down at the Square," in which the narrator is white ("Reading" 89). See Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" for a foundational discussion of the ethics of representation. At least two recent scholars have argued that many of Ellison's essays are training manuals for readers of Invisible Man and that his personal correspondence reveals an anxious concern with the historical relevance of his work. See Jackson 173 and Weber 121–31. See the recent documentary, "Ralph Ellison, an American Journey" (2001). Ellison's "essays often suppress the ambiguity and ambivalence of the published and unpublished texts by presenting the United States as an ethical and national ideal" (Ferguson 67). Also see Weber on how Ellison's essays frame his novel in the terms of individualism and nationalism (117–31). Although Bone argues that the novel succeeds in making blackness "visible," he also reads blackness as a metaphor for the condition of the "individual" in the "machine age," that is, for any "victim of Authority" (197). This racial-sexual move is evident, for example, in the interest Bellow takes in the overtly sexual episodes of Ellison's narrative. In his brief overview, Bellow emphasizes sex scenes, explains how the Battle Royal scene "excited" him, and complains that the narrator's "love affair with a white woman" is "all too brief" (609). Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and its hyperbolic theoretical counterpart, Norman Mailer's "The White Negro" (Citation1957) are famous examples of the appropriation of racialized outsider status for the sexualized re-masculinization of white men. See Scott on theories of black psychological damage. Chicago School sociologist Robert Park's influential theory of a "racial mask" or "uniform" claimed that Asian and black bodies elicited the racist reactions of white people, which were in turn responsible for cultural pathology among racial minorities. In this vision, selfhood was tied to biological features defined as "white." Thus, sociological challenges to racial essentialism inadvertently reinscribed a form of that essentialism upon the rubric of "culture" by relying upon a biological vocabulary and a narrative of "first encounter" that posed white people as psychological agents encountering biological difference: "By designating exteriority instead of interiority as the origin of regulation, sociology made African American culture part of modernity's visible economy and thereby cited the body and social conditions as the locus of being for African Americans" (Ferguson 80). See also Yu 31–34. See Wendy Brown on how liberalism understands feminine "nature" to be an extension of the "private" space of the home, a respite from the social sphere in which men (liberal selves) compete: "liberalism is all or nothing about selves: one group surrenders selfhood so that another group can have it" (161). Also see Judith Butler, in Bodies That Matter, on how foundational Western philosophical texts assert the excluded as that which cannot be a body (a recognizable self), while also requiring it to perform the tasks of the body (women as reproductive "receptacle"). While these accounts focus on the point where gender ideology supplements liberalism/Western philosophy, liberal exclusion proceeds also on (non-parallel) racial terms. Of course, racial and gender differentiation is not just symbolic or discursive but material and economic as well, organizing populations as laborers and consumers. See Ferguson 12–18 and Lowe 1–36. Canonical sociology understood racialization through liberal ideology, producing a narrative of assimilation that rejected biological explanations of racial inferiority but replaced them with theories of black cultural pathology and therapeutic projects for social preservation and reorganization (Ferguson 23). Park's "assimilation cycle" was unable to divest itself of an obsession with racialized bodies; migration, central to Park's cycle, presupposes bodies moving through space and ultimately reproducing sexually, and the idea of a "racial uniform" suggests a biological remainder even after cultural assimilation has taken place. See Park, "Human Migration and the Marginal Man" (1928) (Race 345–56). See Cappetti for a discussion of the connections between writers and Chicago School sociology. Ferguson, Kenneth Warren, and Yu each confront "the idea that the literary and the sociological are discrete and discontinuous formations" (Ferguson 72). Eversley argues that "The Cold War integrationist moment in American culture" required of minority writers the representation of "a racially specific individuality" through psychological interiority (45). Scott argues that Ellison's defense of black psychology aligns him with a central tenet of the Black Power movement (167–68). "For by allowing us to laugh at that which is normally unlaughable, comedy provides an otherwise unavailable clarification of vision that calms that clammy trembling which ensues whenever we pierce the veil of conventions that guard us from the basic absurdity of the human condition" (249). For Ellison, comedy is a therapeutic and revisionary means of seeing clearly the "absurdity" of racism. It is worth noting that Ellison alludes directly to another theory of "masks" in this essay: "But W. B. Yeats had reminded us that '… if we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are and assume the second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves, though we may accept one from others.' And he advised us that 'active virtue, as distinct from the passive acceptance of a current code, is the wearing of a mask'" (163). Ellison adapts this theory for African Americans, describing his own "arduous" experience of donning the mask of a "confident New Yorker" in order to resist "prevailing racial attitudes" (164). The tension between Ellison's adaptation of the Yeatsian mask and Park's theory of the racial mask is the tension between self-projected identity and identity imposed by others. At the scene of the racial joke, in which the race-transcending masks of both Ellison and his interlocutor are displaced by racial masks, Ellison suggests that identity is neither wholly self-constituted nor wholly determined by the body or its interpretation by others. "In Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell appears to have taken a carefully screened assemblage of anti-Negro stereotypes and turned them against the very class in which they found their most fervent proponents" (181). It was only "by forcing [him] to see the comedy in Jeeter Lester's condition and allowing [him] to react to it in an interracial situation without the threat of physical violence" that Tobacco Road "eas[es] the conflict" of Ellison's geographically mixed racial identity (197). This passage reads like an ironic allusion to New Critical railings against the "heresy of paraphrase" (Brooks, Well-Wrought 192–213). The black college the narrator attends—on a scholarship presented after his valedictory speech—is the privileged site of oration for oration's sake, the place where the narrator practices his speech-making skills: "more sound than sense, a play upon the resonances of buildings, an assault upon the temples of the ear" and later, "the sound of words that were no words, counterfeit notes singing achievements yet unachieved" (113, original italics). This is akin to what Ferguson describes as the "violence of interpellation" (64). Note Ellison's debt here to W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois's "veil" is a metaphor not only of exclusion but also of "second-sight" (3). We might read the narrator's progress in this novel as the long acquisition of this "gift," of the ongoing re-vision it effects in him. Finding himself mistaken for Rinehart, a well-known numbers-runner, preacher, and ladies' man, the narrator embraces the misidentification, dons a disguise, and embarks on a shape-shifting experiment through Harlem. Baker argues that Ellison, like Trueblood, operates aesthetically and culturally within a highly constrained economy that requires the marketing of one's work for a white, racist audience: "[I]f folk artists are to turn a profit from their monumental creative energies (which are often counteractive, or inversive, vis-a-vis Anglo-American culture), they must … 'move without moving.' They must … sufficiently modify their folk forms (and amply advertise themselves) to merchandise such forms as commodities in the artistic market. To make their products commensurate with a capitalistic marketplace, folk artists may even have to don masks that distort their genuine selves. Ralph Ellison is a master of such strategies" (843). Baker distinguishes between Ellison's public comments, which promote a hierarchy between "high," Western art forms and African American culture, and his creative work, which renders a much more complex relation between the "literary" and the "folk." Norton's discomfort points also to the threat of a wholly self-constituting black family within which the father appears to hold an authority unavailable to white men. Baker writes, "As cosmic creator, Trueblood is not bound by ordinary codes of restraint. He ventures chaos in an outrageously sexual manner—and survives… . He is the violator of boundaries who—unlike the scapegoat—eludes banishment (834). The widespread myth of black matriarchy serves, in part, as a response to the mythical paternal authority Trueblood represents. Much earlier in the novel, Norton explains to the Invisible Man how he came to help found a black university: "it was because I felt even as a young man that your people were somehow closely connected with my destiny" (41). Note how Norton's singular, first-person subject is instantiated by addressing a plural second person ("your people"). Even when he shifts to address a singular second-person, the Invisible Man comes to stand in for this group: "you are my fate, young man" (42). Ellison depicts Norton's (self-) interest in black people as a kind of liberal racial management: "That has been my real life's work," Norton explains, "not my banking or my researches, but my first-hand organizing of human life" (42). In considering the question of reading and responsibility, as Ellison raises it here, I am drawing from recent work on the ethics of reading. I would point in particular to Derek Attridge's calls for "responsibility" to the literary work as an "event" and Gayatri Spivak's notion that literary responsibility involves both "responding to" a literary work and "answering to" its interpellative call ("Responsibility" 22). I argue that Ellison's work calls for a kind of critical responsibility that acknowledges reading as a dialogic practice of ongoing, self-reflexive revision. Additional informationNotes on contributorsLesley Larkin Lesley Larkin is an Assistant Professor of English at Northern Michigan University. She is pursuing a book-length investigation of how twentieth-century African American literature challenge academic practices of reading race. She has also published on gender and reproductive technology.

<i>Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II</i>by Claire Seiler

Topographies of Anticolonialism: The Ecopoetical Sublime in the Caucasus from Tolstoy to Mamakaev

A Man in Full Tom Williams (bio) Ralph Ellison: A Biography. Arnold Rampersad. Knopf. http://www.randomhouse.com. 672 pages; cloth, $35.00; paper, $17.95. One of the more astute cultural critics of the twentieth century, Holden Caulfield, once asserted that the mark of a good book was "when you're done reading it, you wish the author...was a terrific friend...and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it." Unquestionably, though, had Caulfield succeeded in calling one of his favorite authors, he might not have been too enthused afterward. Who among us has not had that unsettling feeling of discovering that the author, in the flesh, is not the same as the person whom we conjure in our head as we read? The same experience, I find, occurs when one reads a biography of a writer, opening the text with predispositions toward who that writer is, and exiting the same text with the feeling that one would have been better off having not learned so much about the person whose book, as Caulfield would say, "knocks me out." Ralph Ellison has always struck me as the kind of writer that the Holden Caulfields of the world would love to call up. The indomitable power of his single novel, Invisible Man (1952), still inspires readers of all ages and ethnicities, over fifty years after its publication. But Ellison the man has always seemed lesser known. As his much anticipated second novel never appeared in his lifetime, he assumed the status of a "one book writer," and the mythology attending such a categorization overwhelmed Ellison's persona. But it's scarcely hyperbole to state that any remaining mystery about the man has been revealed by Arnold Rampersad in the superb Ralph Ellison: A Biography, as complete a portrait of such a complex character as Ellison I have ever seen. Rampersad rises to the occasion, page after page. Ellison deserves a good biographer, and though this is the first of what will undoubtedly be others, I find it difficult to imagine any subsequent match to this stunningly good book. Such praise should not surprise anyone who has read Rampersad's work before. His books on Jackie Robinson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Langston Hughes demonstrate what is on display in Ralph Ellison: Rampersad's meticulous research, graceful style, and his willingness to approach such prominent African American figures objectively. He neither seems bent on lionizing or taking them down a few pegs. Furthermore, he knows how to stay out of the way: only in the acknowledgments—and then briefly—does Rampersad discuss how he came to write the book. As well, Rampersad is as fine a scholar as he is a biographer, yet at no time does Ralph Ellison seem too academic; it is accessible to far more readers than those conversant with the mumbo jumbo of contemporary critical theory. Yet what a task before him! To write the first biography on Ralph Ellison, perhaps the most significant and/or influential African American writer of the twentieth century. Fortunately, Ellison seemed to know from an early age in Oklahoma that he might be the subject of a biography: The man wrote in his notebook nearly every day and kept everything, judging by his papers housed at the Library of Congress (and of which Rampersad makes exceptional use). Moreover, Ellison lived during so many inherently interesting periods, in such significant places, had he not written Invisible Man, he still would have been an interesting subject, merely for the circles where and among whom he did travel (legendary Tuskegee Institute, the Communist Party, among the black and white literati of Richard Wright, Gordon Parks, Chester Himes, William Styron, and Saul Bellow, to name a few). Indeed, what Rampersad is able to write is something of a cultural history—particularly the development of African American literature and art in the twentieth century; he also fashions a compelling portrait of Ellison's second wife, Fanny, a character almost as fascinating as her husband. But Ellison did write a book, an incredible novel, and Rampersad shows in great detail the artistic development Ellison underwent, from a budding classical musician with...

This article offers a series of experiments exploring the potential for ‘distant reading’ in French music criticism. ‘Distant reading’, a term first coined by literary theorist Franco Moretti, refers to quantitative approaches that allow for new insights into a large corpus of texts by aggregating data. While the main corpus employed here is the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris (1831–1877), I also use secondary corpora of reviews of Félicien David's Herculanum in 1859, Berlioz's reviews of Gluck and Beethoven in the Journal des débats and reviews that mention Gabriel Fauré in the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database. My experiments employ a text analysis tool named Voyant, built by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair, thereby also offering a basic introduction to the range of visualizations employed in distant reading. My experiments focus on areas in which quantitative methods are particularly well suited to generating new knowledge: corpus-wide visualizations and queries, moving beyond traditional text searching, investigations of music critics’ authorial styles and detecting sentiment in reviews, and finally, to geographies of music criticism.

Reviewed by: Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf Anne Besnault-Levita Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf. Claire Drewery. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. 150. $99.95 (cloth). In the last decade, there has been an increased interest in modernist fiction by women. Within the context of the diversified new modernist studies, much work has focused on reviving supposedly minor writers while others have offered new critical perspectives on the short fiction of famous authors such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.1 But since Dominic Head's 1992 study of the modernist short story and his statement that the genre "ought to be seen as centrally involved in the revolution in fictional practice,"2 Claire Drewery's book is the first to take up the subject of modernist short fiction's specificity by examining the complex interconnections between genre, gender, and liminality through an original corpus of texts. In fact, one of the achievements of her book is to convince us, if need be, that the marginalized Richardson and Sinclair should be included in a study of female modernism. Her research also makes a valuable [End Page 214] contribution to recent scholarship on the literary codings of female experience in modernist fiction, although she specifies in her introduction that "the liminal themes common to women's short fiction are . . . characteristic traits of both modernism and the short story in general" (11). Drewery's book maps the locations of liminality in the short stories of Mansfield, Woolf, Richardson, and Sinclair not just as a "pervasive theme" but as a trope expressing "the condition of short fiction as genre" and revealing how it is often preoccupied with "in-between spaces," "moments of interlude," "crises of identity," and the transgression of "boundaries, whether psychological or social, thematic or theoretical" (3). As the liminal is a "complex phenomenon," "both palpable and intangible" (4), Drewery draws on the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralist theory with illuminating readings from Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, and Terry Eagleton, among others. Her main thesis is that "as writers, as modernists, and as women," Mansfield, Richardson, Sinclair, and Woolf "negotiate [liminality's] embodiment of an ominous threat of exclusion with a realm of creative and potentially subversive possibility" (13). As such, her work offers a new reading of the tensions, paradoxes, and ambivalences that are central to the aesthetics of the modernist short story while showing the intimate ties between liminality and "women's subjectivities" (11). The book falls into six chapters, all of them exploring a different aspect of the liminal through the textual analysis of a few representative stories. The first chapter focuses on the spiritual and aesthetic metaphor of the journey as a spatial, temporal, and psychological experience of alienation, exile, and transience. In the second chapter, Drewery addresses the subject of mortality and mourning, two hardly articulable liminal and subjective conditions the representation of which challenges the modernist drive towards formal and structural unity. She offers particularly subtle and convincing pages on Mansfield's fictions of haunting memories. The third chapter logically moves from "impossible mourning" to the study of death as a pervading theme and generic trope whereby modernist short fiction negotiates its intrinsic impulse towards an absent "other." Expanding on the recent research on modernism's nostalgia for the past and its resulting "uncanny tradition" (67), the fourth chapter offers a thought-provoking discussion on the psychological and psychoanalytical gothic in a few short fictions by Sinclair and Woolf, and analyses how this other type of liminal experience is conveyed through an experimental and elliptic prose. In the following chapter, Drewery uses Julia Kristeva's theory of signification, Judith Butler's notion of performativity (to me the most useful reference here), and the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman on Modernity and Ambivalence to look in a fresh way at the modernist literary representation of "inner life," its paradoxes and dilemmas. Her concluding chapter explores the link between the modernist epiphanic moment and the liminal condition by building on the recent research on...

The Development of Katherine Mansfield’s First-Person Narratives Elke D’hoker (bio) In narrative terms, the transition from Victorian tale to modern short story in Anglophone literature has often been characterized as a movement from ‘telling’ to ‘showing.’ Anthony Alpers refers to this development as “getting rid of the narrator” (The Life 238), while Clare Hanson describes it as moving “from ‘teller’ to indirect free narration, and from ‘tale’ to ‘text,’” as part of a larger shift from “‘discourse’ to ‘image’ in the art and literature of the period” (1). In the nineteenth-century tale, indeed, a first-person narrator—often a polished version of the author (Shaw 114–15)—guides the reader through the story, guaranteeing its authenticity and providing a certain moral framework. The hallmark of most nineteenth-century tales, this narrative mode is reminiscent of the tale’s origins in communal, oral storytelling traditions. A desire to question narrative authority and remove the teller gradually from the tale characterizes the so-called modern short story, the origins of which—at least in Britain—are usually traced to the 1880s. Early experiments with this other narrative mode, in which focalization alternates with narration,1 can be found in the proto-impressionist psychological sketches of George Egerton, Hubert Crackanthorpe, Ella D’Arcy, and Ernest Dowson (Korte 103–107; Malcolm and Malcolm 12–13). Yet only with the figural narration of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and—especially—Katherine Mansfield does the modern short story really come into its own. In such a story, the narrator virtually disappears behind [End Page 149] the characters’ voice and inner consciousness, mostly rendered through free indirect discourse. In the absence of a narrator to guide, instruct, or communicate with the reader, the emphasis invariably shifts from plot and (moral) message to suggestion, symbolism, and mood. This modernist development in the shaping of the short story, in which Mansfield played a crucial role (Dunn 202, Van Gunsteren 108–115), became especially influential, to the extent that focalization, interior monologue, symbolism, epiphany, and slice-of-life are still among the defining features of the short story today. Nevertheless, this general development should not make us forget that proto-modernist and modernist writers also adopted other narrative modes to turn the moralizing and plot-bound Victorian tale into a literary form suited to the modern age and its aesthetics. Indeed, several writers experimented with first-person narration, the reigning mode of the nineteenth-century tale: Rudyard Kipling introduced uncertainty and ellipsis in his otherwise traditional and plot-bound first-person narratives; Joseph Conrad undermined narrative authority by multiplying his narrators and narrative frames; and Virginia Woolf staged excessively hesitant and self-reflexive narrators in stories such as “An Unfinished Novel,” “The Mark on the Wall,” or “The Lady in the Looking-Glass.” Mansfield’s short fiction contains a surprising number of first-person narratives as well—surprising, because her short stories are, like those of Joyce, often cited as textbook examples of free indirect discourse and focalization. Moreover, in the span of her short career, Mansfield’s first-person narratives undergo a considerable alteration: from satirical and autobiographical first-person narration to a subtle and highly flexible narrative form that perfectly realizes her poetics of impassioned objectivity and cultivation of an intensely felt impersonal style (Head 110; Coelsch-Foisner 98–99). Mansfield’s short fiction thus shows that the short story’s movement from telling to showing need not involve the extinction of the narrative ‘I.’ The “Vignettes” and other prose poems that Mansfield wrote and, to some extent published, in 1907 are the first texts in which an ‘I’ appears. Yet because of their poetical quality (they are collected in Vincent O’Sullivan’s edition of Mansfield’s poetry) and relative absence of narrative development, their ‘I’ resembles more the ‘I’ of lyrical poetry than that of an actual first-person narrator. As in lyrical poetry, moreover, the speaker seems quite close to the actual author. Several small details suggest this [End Page 150] connection: “Vignette III” alludes to Mansfield’s cello, and “Vere” in “Westminster Cathedral” and “Carlotta” in “Summer in Winter” refer to actual persons (86). In general, the “Vignettes” revolve around small...

ITHE GROWING TREND in American colleges to expand their departments of comparative language and literature and to include in the offerings of their foreign language departments courses in English translation of the respective literatures calls for an examination of the texts in use. While a thorough survey of such translations will eventually have to be made, this paper purports to give nothing more than a cursory glance at three stories by Thomas Mann, Tonio Kroger, Death in Venice, and The Bajazzo. These are the ones which will probably be read in our college classes, since they have been included in such a standard collection as the German Classics and in the only two other anthologies of their kind, namely Great German Short Novels and Stories (Modern Library) and Modern German Short Stories (The World's Classics, Oxford University Press). Translations of stories by Thomas Mann have been chosen for examination for the reasons that this great German writer commands a dominant place in a course of German Masterpieces and that these three stories form the logical starting point in an introduction to Thomas Mann. His works, more than those of any other contemporary writer, present themselves as an integrated whole. In matters of content and technique innumerable threads lead from his early short stories to his works of greatest artistic achievement. It is therefore imperative that in the student's first encounter with them their basic problems be presented unadulterated and in the most precise rendering of the artist's own idiom, and that at least an attempt be made to convey to the student an artistic experience as little marred by erroneous or inadequate translations as possible. While a critical evaluation of the artistic achievement of these three translations as a whole seems beyond the scope of this paper, an attempt has been made to point out such obvious mistranslations as may hamper the student's understanding or seriously threaten his aesthetic appreciation of the stories.

Reviewed by: “The Green Bird” and Other Tales/“El pájaro verde” y otros cuentos by Juan Valera Wan Sonya Tang Juan Valera. “The Green Bird” and Other Tales/“El pájaro verde” y otros cuentos. Trans. Robert M. Fedorchek. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, serie de traducciones críticas N°1, 2013. 249 pp. It seems fitting that Professor Fedorchek’s edition and translation of Juan Valera’s “The Green Bird” and Other Tales is available not only in paperback but also through Barnes & Noble as an e-book, a first for publisher Juan de la Cuesta. As Professor Fedorchek reminds readers, Valera led a life filled with international travel, and had he lived in the age of the Internet, he would certainly have delved into cyber territory just as he trotted the terrestrial globe. This first volume in Juan de la Cuesta’s serie de traducciones críticas is furthermore an excellent work to launch into cyberspace, given the book’s purpose and wide appeal. Fedorchek states in the introduction that modern editions of Valera’s work generally consist of his most famous novels, with little attention paid to his short fiction. He names Carmen Bravo-Villasante’s edition of “El caballero del azor” y otros cuentos as one of few recent collections, and a quick WorldCat search confirms the dearth of editions of Valera’s short stories, not to mention the near inexistence of English translations. We must applaud Professor Fedorchek’s project of putting forth a collection of nine of Valera’s tales in English translation and in their original castellano, thereby filling a notable void not only for readers interested in the Andalusian author, but also any who might profess an interest in nineteenth-century Spanish literature or fairy tales, folklore, and historical fiction at large. Professor Fedorchek prefaces his work with a brief introduction (9-17), in which he provides a concise biography of the author, emphasizing Valera’s worldliness and erudition, and then launches into a short commentary on each of the nine stories included in the volume (“The Green Bird,” “The Wizard,” “The Elf-Kiss,” “Matsuyama’s Mirror,” “The Queen Mother,” “The Little Doll,” “The Knight of the Goshawk,” “Doña Mencía’s Captive,” and “The Double Sacrifice”) which “identify Juan Valera as an authentic fairy-tale writer, a fictional chronicler of two legendary Spanish historical personages, and a tongue-in-cheek humorist” (10). Fedorchek’s commentaries range from the consideration of potential source material (in the case of “The Green Bird,” “The Wizard,” and “Matsuyama’s Mirror”) to critical appraisals (“The Little Doll” and “Doña Mencía’s Captive”) and discussions of the common themes of love and magic that run through the nine tales. Professor Fedorchek closes the introduction addressing the unique challenge of recreating Valera’s lively dialogue and polished prose in English, and provides a select bibliography for readers interested in Valera and his short fiction. While the introduction does an excellent job of piquing reader interest in the tales that follow, it nevertheless leaves readers unfamiliar with Valera’s literary production with a number of unanswered questions. Fedorchek states that “although Valera did not produce [stories] in the hundreds like Emilia Pardo Bazán, he wrote a number of tales that are of considerably more than passing interest” (10), but does not specify the exact quantity of [End Page 144] short stories written by the author, nor does he address their distribution throughout Valera’s literary career. Were the short stories written during a particular period of the author’s life, or did they appear at regular intervals? How do they relate to the novels for which Valera is most celebrated? Are there thematic commonalities or notable differences between the short stories and the longer works? Most importantly, are these nine tales representative of Valera’s entire short story corpus, or were they selected specifically for their thematic elements? These are some of the queries that Professor Fedorchek might address in future editions. Where Fedorchek truly shines is in his translations of Valera’s writing, and this comes as no surprise, given his extensive experience. Having translated seventeen volumes of Spanish literature...

This article explores the entanglements of memory and the crisis of location in the context of the India–Pakistan Partition in 1947, as depicted in Saadat Hasan Manto’s short fiction. It will investigate how Manto’s fiction is reflective of the trauma of geographical and existential dislocation with the birth of two nations following a programme of political and epistemic violence and remapping. The study will place special focus on the entanglement of memory and madness alongside the broader issues of nation-formation, alienation and loss. It will examine the trauma of 1947 Partition as a psychological as well as existential crisis that often manifested itself in madness, aphasia and amnesia. With a special attention to the formal qualities of Manto’s short fiction, the article will investigate the human condition of shock and loss by drawing on trauma studies, phenomenology and cognitive psychological studies in episodic memory, unreliable narration and cognition. It will thus examine how the short story is formally and uniquely equipped to reflect the cognitive and phenomenological processes underpinning memory, narrativity and consciousness, especially in their unsettled states of being in a politically violent space. The article specifically focuses on the short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’, which depicts a diplomatically agreed exchange of madmen across the borders of the two newly formed nations of India and Pakistan and the absurdity in the systematized political processes underpinning citizenship, nationality and identity. It will investigate how madness emerges as an existential as well as an epistemic inwardness that resists political classification with its subversive articulation of agency and emotionality. Manto’s short story and fiction in general may be read as a complex analysis of transnational trauma, memory and crisis of existential identity. This article offers such a study.

Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company

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Any account of the postcolonial short story in Singapore needs to begin with a certain amount of necessary groundwork. Singapore’s multi-ethnic and multilingual literary culture calls into question the idea of a single cultural tradition for which reference to ‘the short story’ in the singular might suggest. And while Singapore as a nation-state did emerge from a history of colonization, its future is not necessarily conditioned by that past. An economically developed city-state strategically located between two rising global powers, India and China, Singapore is in many ways hypermodern, having already long encountered many of the contradictions regarding social inequality, multiculturalism and state surveillance that now trouble the postcolonial cities of former colonial powers. If short stories in Singapore defamiliarize readers from the social space of the city-state they also, perhaps more significantly, suggest the need to interrogate the notion of the postcolonial itself, and in particular the implicit privileging of the West in the context of global history. Singapore has literatures in each of its four official languages, but it may be that English-language writing occupies a particularly important nexus within the literary field that we often designate as postcolonial (see below). With this goal in mind, this chapter will explore the short stories of three contemporary Singapore writers — Suchen Lim, Alfian Sa’at and Wena Poon — and the manner in which each writer responds critically to elements of a contemporary Singaporean social space: such examination, however, needs to be prefaced by a brief account of the place of the English-language short story in Singapore.

The subject of this study is A.P. Platonov's true story "The Unknown Flower," as well as the short stories "Dry Bread" and "Flower on the Ground," in their genre-poetical unity and in relation to folklore tradition. This article analyzes the functioning of folk wisdom as a meaning-forming and structural element of Andrei Platonovich Platonov's artistic world. The focus is on the transformation of folklore tradition in the author's poetics, where folk wisdom becomes a form of artistic knowledge and socio-philosophical reflection. The article reveals the organic unity of the embodiment of folk wisdom in various forms of short fiction by the writer. The consistent use of "childish perception" proves to be a stable element fulfilling the function of cognition of the fundamental laws of existence in the artistic system of A.P. Platonov. The methodological basis is formed by a comparative-contrastive analysis and an intertextual approach applied to the fairy tale "The Unknown Flower" and the short stories "Dry Bread" and "Flower on the Ground" in their correlation with the folk tale tradition and the writer's novels. The scientific novelty of this work lies in its first comprehensive and multifaceted systematic analysis of folk wisdom as a stable, pervasive element of A.P. Platonov's artistic system, using the unique material of his short fiction. This novelty is also determined by the fact that it is in these short fiction genres that the author's key philosophical intuitions, long overshadowed by his novels, most clearly crystallize. The multifaceted symbolism of the central images is understood as the personification of life's resilience and a metaphor for the tragic fate of ordinary people under the harsh conditions of the social experiments of the 1920s–1950s. The article concludes that folk wisdom in small genres serves as an effective tool for socio-philosophical reflection and a genuine ideological alternative to the utopian projects presented in The Foundation Pit and Chevengur.

Reviewed by: Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography by Paul Watt Jennifer Oates Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography. By Paul Watt. (Music in Britain, 1600–2000.) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2017. [xvii, 253 p. ISBN 9781783271900. $90.] Illustrations, appendix, bibliography, index. Ernest Newman was a prominent and prodigious British music critic in the first half of the twentieth century. Though he had no formal music education, Newman, as Watt notes, "was one of the most significant—and controversial—music critics and biographers of his generation" (p. 14). Early in his career, he was a leading champion of British music, particularly that of Granville Bantock, Edward Elgar, and Joseph Holbrooke. While his support of native music diminished as his career progressed, his interest in German music of the late nineteenth century (e.g., Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf), Richard Wagner, and opera remained steadfast throughout his life. Using Newman as a lens, Watt provides a thoughtful study of print culture, criticism, and music in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Watt provides the first biography of Newman since his widow's 1963 book (Vera Newman, Ernest Newman: A Memoir by His Wife [London: Putnam, 1963]) and Henry George Farmer's unpublished 1962 account, "Ernest New-man as I Saw Him" (MS Farmer 44, University of Glasgow). While Farmer thoroughly covered Newman's early career, when he was entrenched in freethought and rationalism, Vera Newman sought "to rescue Newman from the taint of freethought" and "to repair his coloured reputation in musical circles" (p. 4). By examining New-man's early career and influences in conjunction with his later writings, Watt illustrates how freethought influences the full span of Newman's oeuvre. Watt's monograph serves as the most objective and thorough study of Newman to date, filling a glaring gap in scholarship on Newman. Watt calls his book a "critical biography … concerned with the motivations—intellectual, personal and economic—behind Newman's work" (p. 2). It is, however, more of an intellectual biography. With Newman as the lens, it is a study of the place of music in intellectual thought and writing in the press. Rather than attempting to address all of Newman's output, the book dips into his prolific career, providing an overview of his work and a deeper exploration of selected topics and publications. Watt's "close and critical reading" of selected works (p. 6) allows him to delve more deeply into Newman's work and influences and to place each work within the broader context of print and music culture. The selection of works focuses on historical and biographical writings as well as what he considers to be most compelling, interesting, and representative of Newman's development as a writer. Watt achieves a nice balance between Newman's prominent writings and those lesser known to music scholars. Watt divides the book into two parts: "The Freethought Years" and "The Mainstream Years." These are preceded by a two-page chronology of Newman's life and chapter 1, which serves as an introduction to Newman and outlines the aims of the book. Part 1 covers the formative years of Newman's writing from the 1880s through the 1890s, showing how Newman cut his writing teeth in freethought periodicals, which revered logic, reason, empiricism, and rationalism. Chapter 2, after a brief outline of Newman's childhood and education, lays the foundation for this portion of the book. Watt explores the [End Page 109] freethought movement, related philosophies, readings that influenced Newman and the state of music criticism at this time. Newman's social, literary, and music criticism of the 1890s is covered in chapter 3. It was in these articles that he developed his writing style, which embraced an intellectual, scientific approach and the comparative method. His freethought articles served a small market and tended to require a brusque, aggressive tone for "maximum rhetorical affect" (p. 12), a manner that, at times, found voice in his later music criticism. The final chapters of this part diverge from the chronological narrative and focus on individual books: Pseudo-Philosophy at the End of the Nineteenth-Century (London: University Press, 1897) and Gluck and the Opera: A Study in Musical History (London: B. Dobell...