FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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Joyce’s Exiles: A Reception History
Get PDFExiles — James Joyce’s lone extant play — has been the subject of scholarly neglect for the past century, with scholars dooming it as an Ibsenian knockoff and “a wholly bad play” (Kenner, 9). I suggest that we look at Exiles in a wholly different context, instead reading it as a theatrical entity worthy of the stage and not reading it as a work of fiction with accompanying stage directions. Far from suggesting that Exiles is Joyce’s magnum opus, I attempt to elevate the status of the place by suggesting that the 1970 revivalist staging of the play helped to catapult the theatrical career of Nobel laureate Harold Pinter. I further gesticulate toward possibilities and opportunities for the gestation of a more complete critical edition
Across the Divide: Feats of Friendship and Romance in the Gulag
Get PDFIn women’s memoirs of the Gulag and Soviet prison system, walls are not represented in the entirely negative way one might expect. Rather, the walls hold a paradoxical position in the texts. For, while they physically separate the women from their loved ones and their old lives, the walls become a platform for building friendships and starting up romantic liaisons by providing a means of communication between prisoners in different cells. The walls also offer the women some real protection from the sexual aggressors shown to dominate mixed spaces—and indeed, the walls of these cells are the known in a system where the unknown poses real danger
Borges as Translator: A Preliminary Examination
Get PDFJorge Luis Borges, primarily known for his original short fiction, also published many translations of other authors’ works over the course of his life, as well as essays on translation theory. Borges proclaimed his own ‘periphrastic’ approach to translation, taking the opportunity to effect changes in his versions of other writers’ works rather than simply attempting to render the source texts into Spanish. In order to examine the strategies employed by Borges in his translations of English-language prose fiction, this paper will consider three texts translated by Borges alongside the original versions: “The Red-Headed League” by Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and “The Purloined Letter.” Analysis of these texts will demonstrate the extent to which Borges is prepared to put into practice the theory of radical innovation that he outlines in his essays on literary and translation theory
Co-instituting the Constituency: The Constituencies of Brexit and Ghislaine Leung’s CONSTITUTION
Get PDFTraversing cultural studies and political theory, this paper asks how any representative is to represent a diverse constituency, given that any constituency is necessarily co-instituted—that is, made up of—multiple and conflicting bodies and interests. Arguing that the term has suffered from a deficit of enquiry within the theoretical and critical humanities, this article thus aims to re-figure the concept of constituency. The specific understanding of constituency formation within the context of British political system, something especially visible in the wake of the EU referendum and its aftermath, highlights that constituencies are understood within this context through an atomic logic—that is, that each constituency is made up of individual constituents. Thinking with the notion of constituent power allows for a better understanding of the co-instituted nature of constituencies: how and by whom they are co-created. This, in turn, undermines any understanding of political representation as a merely bi-directional practice between representative and constituency. Finally, a close reading of Ghislaine Leung’s CONSTITUTION helps probe further both a bi-directional account of constituency formation and the notion that constituencies are themselves atomically structured, upsetting set theory in the process and allowing us to better apprehend the co-constitutive relationship between constituency and constituent.
 
“Sacred Duty”: Walled Secularism in Independent India
Get PDFIsmat Chughtai, an Indian writer in the 20th Century was influential in the Urdu literary scene for her role in furthering the women’s cause. This paper focuses on her translated short story “Sacred Duty” in which the sanctity of ‘secularism’ is questioned by addressing interfaith marriages in order to polarise religious orthodoxy of older generations with that of the flippancy of the youth. It unfurls the pseudo-fraternal form of coexistence of the middle and upper class ‘progressives’ that was practiced to appease their own sense of modernity. By contextualising this within the communal riots of post-partition India, a seeming anxiety is noticed within the newer generations in contending with their ‘duty’ to the nation and religion. Offsetting this against the postcolonial scholarship by Partha Chatterjee based on Benedict Anderson’s notion of an “imagined community,” this story remarks on the strength of that argument in view of the religious boundaries that consecrate such a nation. The married couple Samina and Tashar’s stance heralds a crucial question about the possibility of climbing over this wall drawn out by Hindus and Muslims and escaping this ‘community’ altogether. Through this analysis, the restricted nature of Indian secularism post-Independence is highlighted as propagating divisionist ideology
Combative Transatlantic Literatures: An Analysis of Washington Irving’s The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun
Get PDFThis paper discusses the combative literary and cultural relations between the Old World of Europe and the New World of the United States. In analysing the use of irony within nineteenth-century renditions of the travelogue genre, I trace the transatlantic struggle as originating from an American post-colonial inferiority complex. By examining Washington Irving’s 1820 The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1860 text The Marble Faun, this paper will demonstrate the New World’s advent of creative autonomy and self-perceived artistic decolonisation of the European forbears’ traditions. I argue that within these texts, the subversion of the travelogue form enacts defiance of hegemonic European cultural assertion, producing literature that asserts its own existence and reflects the infant nation’s political inception. This paper additionally interrogates and evaluates the literary epoch of the American Renaissance and its imagined status as being the beginnings of American artistry
Spregelburd’s Stubbornness
Get PDFIn recent years I have almost religiously gone to see something by or featuring Rafael Spregelburd whenever I visit Argentina, on stage or screen. On my last trip, this March, alongside two films(Florencia Percia’s debut Cetáceos and Lucrecia Martel’s historical drama Zama) and a talk, in conversation with the academic Gabriel Guz, it was his ambitious play La terquedad (Stubbornness). Spregelburd is widely acknowledged as one of Argentina’s most significant contemporary dramatists. His work appears regularly on European festival stages, and has won prizes worldwide. He has translated Harold Pinter, Sarah Kane, and other British playwrights for performance in Spanish. Yet it is a number of years now since The Argentine Moment appeared at London’s Royal Court, and his namewill hardly be familiar to British readers. Some may recognise him as a screen actor, playing the proverbially tortured political artist, gruff husband to the eponymous heroine, and love rival to SamHuntington’s lead in Nico Casavecchia’s Finding Sofia (2016)
Grace, Laura Jane. Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock\u27s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout. New York: Hachette, 2016. 320 pp. ISBN: 9780316387958. £13.99. Print.
Get PDFIn her autobiography Tranny (2016), punk singer/songwriter Laura Jane Grace explores the excesses of two forms of subversion, against the music industry, and heteronormativity as a transgender woman. In the following review, Gina Maya analyses the implications of her experiences as a counter-cultural icon