Plaza: Dialogues in Language and Literature (Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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A Non-Zero-Sum Game or An Essay About Nothing
No full textIn this essay, I take a critical look at the notion of zero or nothing, as it plays out in our daily lives and in literature, specifically poetry. Nothing is not something that we learn from experience, but rather a concept we invent to fill a void. This essay looks at the causes and effects of that void
Infectious Revolutions: Gender, Science, Identity and Humanity in Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite
No full textInarguably, Herculine Barbin is quite blatantly centered around the question of performative gender identity. Perfomativity has helped us to better understand the cultural mechanisms that control individual and group identity formation in every area from gender to ethnicity, and, in a more literary application, it has also helped us to understand the construction of fictional characters. In spite of the width of this range, the application of the concept of performativity to the construction of human-identified subjectivity appears to have been little, if at all, explored. I find this lack unfortunate, because I think that bringing the lens of performativity to bear on an analysis of human subjectivity reveals not only a great deal about how our identities are constructed, but also about the nineteenth-century social anxieties over scientific revolutions that originally drove such constructions. Darwin’s theories and other evolutionary science were sources of preoccupation and anxiety for people in the nineteenth century expressly because evolutionary science inevitably raises uncomfortable doubts about the essentialism of human subjectivity. Darwinian and Lamarkian ideas about evolution both unsettled firm ideas about human identity and destabilized accepted notions of the boundary between human and animal. This led to anxieties about identity, and left performance as one of the last definitive markers of humanity in a distressingly uncertain paradigm. Herculine Barbin arises from this matrix of fear and uncertainty, and the hermaphroditic author\u27s tragic experiences are representative of a larger terror of the problematization of human subjectivity that expressed itself by representing the biologically marginal as monstrous in order to shore up the vanishing boundaries that defined humanity
Mind, Your Own Business: The Use of Psychic Distance in Cultivating Authorial Omniscience
No full textPsychic distance, that is, the distance the reader feels between himself and the story or character, is just one tool that an author has when seeking a reader’s engagement. However, it is an important tool because managing psychic distance deftly rewards both author and reader and mismanagement can seriously impair the reader’s enjoyment. A number of contemporary dystopian novels employ some form of third-person omniscience to various effects. Of these texts, I will analyze four of them to review both traditional and non-traditional uses of psychic distance and to comment on the relative success of each text in achieving the desired effect. This paper applies quantitative methods to the samples under scrutiny in order to quantify the dynamics at play.
The "Discrete Occupational Identity" of Chaucer\u27s Knyght
No full textPopular critical opinion favors reading the pilgrim Knyght of Chaucer\u27s The Canterbury Tales as an idealized chivalric knight; however, the pilgrim Knyght bears the hallmark of the early professional soldier that began to evolve as early as the eleventh century. Both Chaucer\u27s experiences as a soldier, plus his exposure to English troops, seem likely sources for this portrait of the professional warrior. This essay considers the construction of the pilgrim Knyght as a professional soldier based on his warfare experience and his verbal cues
Freeing the Sign
No full textWhile the meaning of symbols in Yeats\u27s poetry depends upon their relation to other objects and symbols within the poem in which they appear, they often seem to retain a fixed, stable meaning across all of his poetry. For instance, although in one poem the moon\u27s changeability figures prominently, while in another, its eclipsing power is emphasized, the moon still retains the feminine aspect in both poems. When we turn to other poems in Yeats\u27s oeuvre containing the symbol of the moon, we see it continues to evoke the feminine and all the traits typically identified with the feminine gender. Considering our understanding of the sign or symbol as functioning on the relational level, how is it that a specific meaning gets consistently attached to an arbitrary object like the moon? Does the fact that this happens mean that individual symbols possess their own distinct evocation, as in a stable fixed meaning? What are the implications if this is the case? I argue that much more than understanding the way that symbolism functions in Yeats\u27 oeuvre is at stake here. If the meaning of symbols such as the moon is indeed fixed in Yeats, than we rightfully question whether this is the case beyond Yeats, that is, if the moon is a stable, universal sign for the feminine rather than being merely arbitrarily so. If so, this would further imply that the deeply rooted dual gender ideology that in part depends upon this configuration of moon as feminine and sun as masculine is not just an artificial construct but a Universal one. If we move beyond Yeats\u27s work and into the function of the moon as symbol in other cultures, we can determine whether the moon really is a fixed, stable symbol of the feminine, and if not, whether it can be re-configured to take on new meanings, freed from perpetual association with gendered ideology
Vindicating the Historical Romance
No full textThe romance as a genre made $1.368 billion in sales last year. Despite this impressive profit margin, however, many people dismiss romance novels as “trash,” “smut,” “bodice-ripper,” and the new buzz word, “mommy porn.” Some of the harshest criticism of romance novels comes from feminist scholars like Kay Mussell, who contends that “as an art, [romances] are profoundly unsatisfying and profoundly derivative, for they represent a pathetic attempt to make dramatic a story that seems to lack resonance.” If what Mussell believes is true, why is this genre so popular? Could it be there is something in these books that is powerful and meaningful, perhaps something that calls for a change in society?I propose that there are elements in the historical romance that encourage a change in our current societal expectations for women. These novels promote change through their representations of empowered heroines who subvert traditional expectations of women’s roles in their own society, thus challenging readers to re-evaluate modern day society’s expectations of beauty, love, and a woman’s role in marriage. Even though these books are not set in our time period, their ideology against which their protagonists struggle is still both powerful and relevant. By looking at the past through the lens of the present, we can see that these novels encourage an evolution of societal expectations in three ways: one, by giving women an identity, two, by making women realize that they are unique and beautiful just as they are, and three, by encouraging the idea that women should view marriage as a choice--not just a societal expectation
From Reality to Legend - Baroque Representation as a Means of Transcendence
No full textEveryone has some special quality about them, yet there are only a handful that capture the popular imagination and become legends. Are these legends born or created? What is it that can transform someone from a mere person to an icon idolized by many? This paper examines the Baroque tradition of representation as a means to the transcendence from man to legend. By using the examples of (the non fictional) Frida Kahlo and (the fictional) Sierva Maria, I have tried to examine, understand and explain the elements of representation. This paper attempts to illustrate that fact that in most cases the power of representation is almost as potent, if not more, than the power of the individuals themselves.
Exploring the Bawdy Court Ethos in Measure for Measure\u27s Design: Putting the Church Courts’ Newly Stringent Laws Governing Sex and Betrothal on Trial
No full textWhen Measure for Measure was staged in 1604, English common law recognized a couple’s right to form a valid marriage through nothing more than mutual consent. As B.J. Sokol and Mary Sokol point out, these marriages, known as spousals, granted men and women “a remarkable autonomy” and control over their marital destiny, however theoretical. But illogical as it may seem, the church courts (known as the “bawdy courts”) had the authority to fine these same couples for entering into a clandestine marriage and failing to solemnize it in the church. In effect, a spousal in Shakespeare’s England was often regarded as a valid, albeit illicit, marriage. Measure for Measure raises questions about the validity of the respective marital states and sexual transgressions of three betrothed couples¾Claudio and Juliet, Angelo and Mariana, and Lucio and Kate Keepdown. Through the intricacies of its main plot, the play raises moral questions about the sexual acts of the first two couples, regardless of the fact that both couples are “betrothed” or “espoused” under marital pre-contracts that would have been deemed valid under English common law (outside the play’s fictional realm of Vienna.) The play’s treatment of the sins of these couples resembles the bawdy courts’ judgments upon actual couples that were charged with crimes associated with clandestine marriages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This paper will argue that Measure for Measure’s salacious courtroom ethos, which simulates the censure of the bawdy courts through its judgment of two betrothed couples¾Claudio and Juliet, and Angelo and Mariana¾drew attention to England’s byzantine marriage laws, while also implicitly challenging the church courts’ increasingly punitive judgments against sexual misconduct following changes to canon law in 1604.