Plaza: Dialogues in Language and Literature (Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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Economics and Mate Selection in The Beau Defeated
No full textDuring the Restoration era the preponderance of plays were written by men, thereby negating any opportunity for etic female commentary on British life during this time in this arena of popular culture. Although women were allowed to work, and often did so, those who were married had virtually no control over the household finances, nor money or property in cases where their husbands\u27 deaths preceded their own. Due to the legal and economic structure of Britain during this time women, from an economic standpoint, were effectively slaves. Mary Pix, one of the few female playwrights of her time, used her position as a mechanism for illustrating the lack of equal treatment given to women in the economic sector and to demonstrate the liminal position women occupied. My paper explores the legalities of this liminal space in terms of property rights and inheritance law through an examination of Pix\u27s play, The Beau Defeated (1700), and the laws of that era. The paper explores the way the law represented different types of women: the maid, the widow, and the married woman; her place within society, the societal norms as related to class and the rights for women to their shared and personal money and real property during this era through the skillfully written machinations of two lead female characters to find the kind of husband that best fit the type of lifestyle each wished to live. This paper can be presented in approximately fifteen minutes.
Violence, Language, and the Natural World: Finding ‘Nature’ in Faulkner and McCarthy
No full textWilliam Faulkner’s “The Bear” has often been cast as a lamentation of the loss of wilderness and the natural world. Indeed, the story and the novel Go Down, Moses as a whole, portray a wilderness that is giving way to the demands of civilization. But this view accords a privilege to the natural world, assuming that it is of some higher order than civilization, that it ought to be preserved on account of its more impressive credentials. The critical works on Cormac McCarthy do not present the same issue; he is not cast as a preserver of much of anything other than some forms of modernism. Still, his work very much focuses on the relationship between man and land. Child of God, in particular, seems to brim with the struggles between man and wild. Nonetheless, an argument could be made that McCarthy privileges the natural world by virtue of his lush depictions, the pauses in the text to marvel at a ribbon of frost among weeds or the mating of hawks. This paper moves past such arguments, hypothetical or otherwise, and presents the argument that the texts privilege neither the natural world nor civilization, instead according privilege only to the ever-present violence. If the texts hold open a sort of mystical space for a pure essence of something beyond the grasp of the noumenal world, it is not a space for the majesty of the wilderness, it is a space for a type of truth that promises only a brutal existence for both civilization and the natural world
Landscapes of Distance or Landscapes of Intimacy: Language Construction, Voice, and the Narrative "I"
No full textWriters of autobiographical narratives are constantly balancing on the high wire of liminality, simultaneously situating themselves on the inside and outside of cultural manifestations of class, gender, ethnicity, and race. The personas created in autobiographical narratives are authenticated primarily through the negotiations of autobiographical memory, and both the emotional and physical landscapes in which they reside. Using autobiographical scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s work on the emergence of an author’s voice as a critical attribute of the narrating ‘I,’ this paper will explore the blurred areas of intimacy and distance created between the reader’s felt experience of the narrator’s personhood and his/her experiential history. The critical nature of the narrative voice then, becomes the primary lens in which meaning-making occurs. As both readers and writers of life narratives, we make sense out of experience, history, truth, and memory through the complexities of visual, spoken, and/or written language.Because life writing is so incredibly personal and interwoven with historicity, memory, and experience, the successes and failures, I argue, of autobiographers like Alfred Kazin, Janisse Ray, and Will Self rests in their ability to create a narrative intimacy or a narrative distance through the spaces in which they occupy and interact. Both the physical and psychological landscapes in which they situate themselves become the primary locales of emotional attachment or detachment for readers, thus their ability to create a believable and authentic narrative persona hinges on their rhetorical capabilities. In this paper, I will specifically focus on the texts of Kazin, Ray, and Self for critical analysis
Rhetorical Analysis of Globalization in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
No full textAlthough this essay does not directly address real-life examples of neoliberalism’s effects on class, race, culture, gender, ethnicity and so on, in the United States, it does analyze neoliberalism’s connections to globalization, which reverberates throughout Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things. In this narrative, the consequences of British imperialism, a precursor to neoliberal thinking, and globalization, a direct consequence of the neoliberal framework, exacerbate the violence that inextricably links the Ipe, Kochamma, and Paapen families. Roy’s novel, moving forward and backward in time, suggests that what happens to families, at the local level, is directly linked to larger political and economic forces. Moreover, I contend that, because history is inescapable in the world of the novel—even for those who are seemingly more powerful than others—several characters who inhabit that world constantly attempt to adjust their constructed realities to uphold the remnants of British rule and the well-established framework of the Indian caste system. Remarkably, however, it is not these characters who suffer the consequences of their actions; in reality, it is the children, their divorced mother, and the Untouchable worker who are made to suffer for the misdeeds of others. In poetic and yet stark language, Roy demonstrates how these victims are irreparably harmed and, in the case of the worker, at least, killed at the hands of the state. Specifically, the ways in which British imperialism and globalization affect the world of the novel can be seen in the connections between the local and the global, and the disappearance of bodies.
The Essential Fallacy of Europe
No full textThis essay examines Post Colonial theorist Edward Said\u27s use of Nietzschian philosophy as a starting point for the establishment of a discourse based largely on European writings about "the Orient." Along with questioning the thoroughness of Said\u27s Nietzschian methodologies, this essay argues that continued use of the terms "Europe" and "Europeans" be reexamined in Post Colonial conversations due to these term\u27s inaccurate representation of Europe as continent and cultural expression that is altogether removed from Asia and "the Orient.
A Wilderness of Cyborgs: Haraway, Shakespeare, and the Female Revenge Narrative in Titus Andronicus and Titus
No full textThis essay explores the independent identity and function of Tamora and her revenge narrative in Titus Andronicus. Multiple critics read Tamora as a manipulated tool of main antagonist Aaron, or as a doubled or mirrored identity/narrative of “ultimate” protagonist Titus; few address her as an independent actor, or her revenge plot as key to the play’s narrative. I counter this perspective, and explore Tamora’s role as independent actor and the centrality of her revenge narrative to the play’s broader narrative arch as well as to future narratives of this genre.Utilization of Donna Haraway’s theory of cyborg feminism heavily informs this reading; the essay approaches Tamora as a feminist cyborg identity, and locates her plot as a crucial steppingstone in the development of the female revenge narrative. Tamora’s characterization within the narrative, her use of her own body and affiliations with other characters, and her role within and interaction with the social and political environment all link her to this identity, and the development of similar characters in later works situate her within the development of the female revenge narrative.Julie Taymor’s film adaptation of the play, Titus (1999), ends this reading, addressing the director’s interpretation of Tamora and how this informs a feminist analysis of the text