Plaza: Dialogues in Language and Literature (Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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Legal Publics in Shakespeare’s Hamlet
No full textWidely known for its famous soliloquies, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is often argued to stress the importance of the individual experience. Although these arguments are persuasive, they leave out the essential evidence within the play for collaboration and public spaces. This essay considers how Hamlet illuminates Shakespeare’s account of selfhood, which I will suggest is collaborative rather than individual. It does so by proposing that Hamlet models a legal public. This legal public consists of juries that are made up not only by characters within the play but also by audience members and are formed in order to provide answers to the wealth of epistemological questions posed by the play. To make this argument, I will first reflect on the relationship between the law and the theater in early modern England and how these fields were growing in analogous ways. The resources I will draw upon to illustrate the legal-theatrical relationship will be scholarly accounts that provide a wealth of knowledge in regards to the rising popularity of forensic evidence, trial by jury, and the commercial theater. I will then explore the concept of Habermas’s public sphere to articulate how the juries created in Hamlet make up a legal public and how that term should be defined. My final move will be to relate all of this information back to the play itself. Through a close reading from this perspective, I will relay how the characters attempt to answer the major questions of the play through collaborative forms of knowledge. To sum up, I will bring the Theory of the Public Sphere to bear on Hamlet’s legal themes in order to make an argument that the play models a legal public as part of its larger concern with collaboration and sociality
You Get Off On Stealing: Kathy Acker, Travelogues, and the American Imperial Instinct
No full textHaiti maintains an outsized presence in the American literary imagination, where it represents a compelling confluence of ideas and themes. Like its neighbor in the Western hemisphere, it rejected a colonial ruler through a revolution. Yet it is a predominantly black nation, one with a troubled history and questionable leadership, including decades of imperialism at the service of the United States itself. While this fascination with Haiti waxes and wanes, it has lasted into the twenty-first century, continually renewed with natural and political disasters.This complicated relationship is especially evident in what was once an ostensibly innocuous literary genre: the travelogue. Haitian travelogues, which were especially popular in the years before World War II, offer a captivating depiction of the American cultural attitudes towards Haiti. These guides often approach their subject with an unselfconsciously imperial gaze. They suggest racial and cultural superiority, reinforce imperial relationships, and cast the occupants of the visited nation as “the other.” They are also ripe for parody.In her 1978 novel, Kathy Goes to Haiti, Kathy Acker explores this territory by offering a mocking satire of the travelogue. Acker’s partially autobiographical heroine aspires to lose herself in Haiti, specifically in the company of its men. However, she cannot escape her own Americanness. Instead of a politically-neutral immersion in Haitian culture, Acker shows us that American tourism is subject to the imperial instinct and provides her readers with a trenchant cultural critique of the travelogue genre
Facing the Challenges Inherent in Teaching Online: A Case Study
No full textCommunity colleges and universities have found that they can increase their enrollment with only a small impact to their budgets by providing courses online. At the same time, online courses have gained tremendous popularity with students. Unfortunately, however, success rates in online courses are proving to be significantly lower than in traditional classrooms. In no course of study is this more evident than in online composition courses. The key issue revolves around training and support for teachers through the establishment of best practices for online instruction. In addition, it has been suggested that a screening process for students who enroll in online classes would improve retention rates by insuring that students are good candidates for online study before they begin a new course. This paper examines the issues and applies them in a case study of online freshman composition courses at Sam Houston State University conducted in the fall of 2012
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Agency Regarding her Disillusionment with Socially Prescribed Domesticity Norms
No full textCharlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is one of the earliest pieces of literature that delves into the stifled subject of female depression associated with motherhood. While it is understood that such intellectual womens’ despair and suffering stems from having their creative outlets, such as expressive and cathartic writing, wrongfully taken from them once they became mothers, I contend that Gilman’s main character is not only falling into deeper psychosis, but also perhaps attempting to be heard via her odd behaviors. Such “scandalous” writings illuminate personal insight such brave female pioneers dared to share with their readers, even if thought to be veiled. I believe when such authors wrote they were often doing so, maybe even unconsciously, as a form of self-therapy, but also, as a way of screaming for help. This still volatile topic—sharing the taboo personal pains associated with domestic disillusionment-- deserves to be considered part of the ongoing discourse related to the theme of domestic ideology, conventions of motherhood, writer’s silences and female creativity
The Missing Kingdom: Graham Greene\u27s The Power and the Glory and the Sermon on the Mount in St. Matthew\u27s Gospel
No full textCritics who engage the religious aspects of Graham Greene\u27s The Power and the Glory tend to focus on the status of the Whiskey Priest\u27s orthodoxy in relation to the Roman Catholic Church. However, by reading Greene\u27s novel along side the Sermon on the Mount from St. Matthew\u27s Gospel the reader discovers a different way of seeing the novel\u27s two primary charcters. Instead of seeing the Whiskey Priest and the Lieutenant as being diametrically opposed to one another, the concepts of the Kingdom of God from the Sermon on the Mount enables the reader to see these two as doubles, as deeply flawed saints
Forces of Habit: Coping Mechanisms in Hemingway\u27s Veterans
No full textAs veterans of WWI, Hemingway’s fictional characters no doubt endured severe physical torture; the stories of Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises, Frederic Henry of A Farewell to Arms, and Nick Adams of various short stories all make explicit reference to physical wounds these heroes have suffered in war. And the intangible psychological wounds Hemingway’s veterans endure – most notably shell shock – have been widely discussed in academic discourse. However, the physical manifestations of these characters’ psychological traumas have yet to be fully explored. Utilizing a combination of trauma and literary theory, as well as contemporary studies of neurosis in WWI veterans, it is possible to identify in Hemingway’s characters the physical expression of these veterans’ psychological trauma, on the surface repressed through a combination of the characters’ and author’s suppression
Aleksandr Vampilov’s Drama “Duck Hunting” and The (In)different Character in the Different Theatre: Phenomenological Analysis of Viktor Zilov’s Revolution
No full text Aleksandr Vampilov’s “Duck Hunting” (1967) is a revolutionary drama which initiated the new Soviet theatre and the new post-Soviet theatre later on. Vreneli Farber underlines the wealth of the author’s dramaturgic techniques: “Vampilov < in “Duck Hunting”> conveys his ideas in a variety of ways: a play-within-a-play, symbolism …, character contrasts …, farce and tragedy, and an inconclusive ending. This play reflects… his moving away from mainstream Socialist Realism[1]”. The real discovery of the play is its main character ― Viktor Zilov, who evokes many contradictory responses in the world critique. Over the course of few days the thirty year old engineer lives a small life, full of hypocrisy, disillusions and searching for his real “self”, and a small death in “a series of “recollections”1”. The question of the play’s finale is still debatable. Few critics assert that the central protagonist manages to find his way back to himself. The overwhelming majority suggests that the character’s “self-evaluation” ultimately becomes his “self-destruction”. I consider the problem of the protagonist of Aleksandr Vampilov’s play from the phenomenological point of view for the first time, as uncommon literary works require uncommon approaches from their researchers. Phenomenological analysis will make it possible to prove that Viktor Zilov accomplishes not the re-evaluation, but the revolution; that he revolts against former himself and emerges victorious. My focus is on Zilov’s cues, which favor the display of his main traits to a considerable extent, as well as on communicative strategies of some other characters and stage directions from the drama.[1] Farber V., The playwright Aleksandr Vampilov. An Ironic Observer, New York, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2001, p. 83
Trickster V. Colonialism: Old Ways and New Ways in The Plague of Doves
No full textExamining the trickster myth in Ojibwan culture as presented in Louise Erdrich\u27s The Plague of Doves
Must We Mean What We See
No full textMy paper focuses on one novel, Middlesex and two novellas: Quicksand and Passing, which deal with the issues of ambiguity in a society obsessed with discrete categorical thinking. The theory research I chose will highlight the common ground these novels share concerning issues of race, gender, sex, class, and the empowerment of resisting societal norms. In this paper, I will analyze the forms of resistance, as carried out by the voice of the narrator/character, in each novel, and how they each serve to negotiate the promise of social mobility in the context of a world holding tight to traditional boundaries of segregation