American and British Studies Annual 3/2010

American and British Studies Annual Volume 3, 2010

Published by the University of Pardubice/Vydává Univerzita Pardubice Studentská 84, 532 10 Pardubice www.upce.cz/en/ff/kaa/casopis.html Volume’s responsible editors/ editoři čísla: Šárka Bubíková, Daniel Sampey, Ladislav Vít We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the United States Embassy in Prague in helping us cover the publishing cost of this volume. ISSN 1803-6058 ISBN 978-80-7395-339-3

American and British Studies Annual The American and British Studies Annual is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal focused on American and British cultural studies. Mission statement: Our aim is to create a platform for scholarly exchange not only within the Czech Republic but internationally. We seek original articles that explore a wide range of issues concerning American and British literature, visual arts, music and other cultural phenomena as well as cultural history. The editors encourage submissions from scholars working in various disciplines with interests in American and British cultures, as well as articles with interdisciplinary perspectives on those cultures. We also devote a portion of the journal to outstanding student contributions. Since 2010, the journal has been enlisted in The National Index of Peer-reviewed Scholarly Periodicals published in the Czech Republic. Editorial Board: Chief editor: Šárka Bubíková, University of Pardubice, Pardubice Executive editor: Ladislav Vít, University of Pardubice, Pardubice Board: Antonella Cagnolati, University of Foggia, Foggia Petr Chalupský, Charles University, Prague Bernie Higgins, Charles University, Prague Stanislav Kolář, University of Ostrava, Ostrava Zofia Kolbuszewska, John Paul II Catholic University, Lublin Bożena Kucała, Jagiellonian University, Kraków Bohuslav Mánek, University of Hradec Králové, Hradec Králové Lucie Podroužková, Masaryk University, Brno Olga Roebuck, University of Pardubice, Pardubice Daniel Paul Sampey, University of Pardubice, Pardubice

Contents Articles: Šárka Bubíková Gains and Losses of Immigration in Julia Alvarez: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents 9 Petr Chalupský Biting Divagations – Self-discoveries in Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs 20 Kathleen Dubs Sleeping in Beowulf 34 Janka Kaščáková Meeting of the Traditional and the Modern: Jane Austen’s Emma and Katherine Mansfield’s “A Cup of Tea” 51 Marija Knežević Sherman Alexie’s Version and Subversion of Native American Storytelling Tradition 61 Karla Kovalová Piecing Memories, Connecting Lives: The (Inter)Textual Quilt in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata 76 Christopher E. Koy “You is got a monst’us heap ter l’arn yit”: Charles Chesnutt’s Revisions of Albion Tourgée’s ‘Carpetbagger’ and ‘White Negro’ Characters 87 Bożena Kucała Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love: the Invention of Tradition 96 Katarína Labudová “Myth is more instructive than history.”: (Re)constructions of Biblical Myths in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve 106 Ivan Lacko Challenging the Angel: Dramatic Defamiliarization in Angels in America 118 David Levente Palatinus From the Pictorial Turn to the Embodiment of Vision 127

Josef Pecina Antebellum Sensational Novels and Subversion of Domesticity 136 Ewa Rychter Like a Grain of Sand Irritating an Oyster. Howard Jacobson’s The Very Model of a Man and the Bible 144 Krystyna Stamirowska On Reading, Readers and Authors 158 Anna Světlíková Type, Allegory, Symbol: Jonathan Edwards and Literary Traditions 169 Paul Titchmarsh Alternative Histories: Philip Roth and The Plot Against America 182 Roman Trušník Christopher Isherwood: A Major Model for the Margin? 194 Student section: Ivana Marvánová “Migrant Mother”: the Depression Era Madonna 207 Book Reviews: Ladislav Vít “What is the Citie, but the People? True, the People are the Citie.” 219 News, Calls, Announcements 223

9 Gains and Losses of Immigration in Julia Alvarez: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents Šárka Bubíková Abstract Immigration is a frequent theme in American literature both in fiction and in so-called ego- documents. But while United States was often considered a country of immigrants, immigration has only lately ceased to be automatically linked with assimilation and integration. In my analysis of the Julia Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), I will focus on how immigration is depicted as both a loss and a gain, as a kind of oscillation between the need to accommodate to new home and to retain what is fundamental to one’s identity from the old. Keywords Twentieth-century American ethnic novel, Immigration, bi-culturality, Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accent “The migrant has been presented as emblematic of the postmodern, post-industrial condition, a sort of epiphenomenon and heightened version of the consequence of postmodernity.” Françoise Král1 In recent years, the issue of identity has been considered among the central concepts of cultural and literary studies, the formation of identity often being a central theme of many literary works, particularly texts concerned with bi-culturalism, diaspora, and/or immigration. Anthropologists and behavioral scientists André Levi and Alex Weingrod argue that in the current view “diasporas are enthusiastically embraced as arenas for the creative melding of cultures and the formation of new ‘hybridic,’ mixed identities” and thus to be part of a diaspora is “presumably to be ‘on the cutting edge’ of new cultural formations.”2 A parallel movement can be seen in literature as well. For example Françoise Král notes a paradigmatic shift in the tone of texts depicting diasporas and immigration, namely that they have “moved away from a certain tragic mode linked to the experience of diaspora as loss, nostalgia and longing for the past, to embrace the more alluring theme of positive immigration and self-reinvention abroad.”3 However, despite the fact that on a theoretical level immigration is increasingly seen in positive terms, in the lives of individual people (as well as literary characters) it generally consists of gains (as for example escaping danger, gaining new, perhaps freer and more self- aware individuality) as well as losses (of homeland, culture, roots). The Dominican American writer Julia Alvarez reflects in her novel both the positive and the negative dimensions of immigration. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) tells the story of four sisters who, for political reasons, are forced to move to the United States from their affluent home in the Dominican Republic. The novel adopts shifting narrative perspectives and disrupts 1 Françoise Král, Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2. 2 André Levi, Alex Weingrod ed., Homelands and Diasporas (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005) 5. 3 Král, Critical Identities, 11.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 10 the conventional chronological plot structure by using a more or less backwards timeline, opening with the protagonists’ adult lives in 1989 in the United States and ending with their early childhoods in 1956 in the Dominican Republic. As Richardo Castells explains, this backward glance and the book’s initial nostalgic focus on the country and culture of origin makes Alvarez’s novel different from a typical immigrant novel/autobiography where the dénouement is usually formulated in terms of eventual assimilation and success in the new country.4 These formal aspects of the novel correspond to its topic, or more precisely, they parallel some of the issues involved, such as the protagonists’ need to look back to their roots and constantly re-create their identity juggling their current situation in America with backward glances towards their Dominican home. Ellen Mayock similarly suggests that opening the novel with the mature protagonists (mostly through Yolanda’s storytelling) working their way back “implies perhaps a need to recover a distant self or cultural location through memory, nostalgia, and the power of the pen.”5 William Luis sees the function of the reversed chronology in a similar manner: “The novel is an attempt to understand memory, the past, and a time before the sisters lost their innocence and accents.”6 Dividing the story among several narrators and employing both the first person and the third person narratives corresponds to the cultural fragmentation the four protagonists at times experience as well as to the postmodern tendency to give up any single and universal narrative in favor of viewing something from different, even conflicting angles to get a more complex if less comprehensible, picture. On a more personal level, these formal innovations also reflect inner fragmentation, the existence of multiple selves. This of course is not to say that the protagonists are suffering from some psychic disorder, it only means that as they move from culture to culture, they find themselves influenced and modified by each. The fragmentation of the self, however, need not be seen in negative terms only; in fact it is a way of coping with biculturalism and with the opposing demands of the Dominican and American cultures. And, as also Mayock points out, “this ability to separate into two selves helps the protagonists to be effective voyeurs, poets, and storytellers along their paths to self-discovery.”7 The Garcías trace their family roots back to the Conquistadores. They form a large, well-to-do, respected Dominican family whose father organizes the opposition against the dictator Trujillo’s power. However, when the plot is revealed, the father’s life is in great danger. The family manages to escape with the help of an American consul but it is a very narrow escape indeed. Thus the four girls grow up partly in Dominica, partly in New York and they are deeply affected by [their] geographical past and present, by the cultural implications of that geography, by the constantly evolving mosaic of the combination of two distinctly different cultures, and, to complicate matters, by the changing ‘locations’ of [their] developing adolescent selves.8 4 See also James Craig Holte’s book The Ethnic I, that Castells quotes. 5 Ellen C. Mayock, “The Bicultural Construction of Self in Cisneros, Alvarez, and Santiago,” Bilingual Review 23 no. 3 (1998): 223. 6 William Luis, “A Search for Identity in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” Callaloo 23 no. 3 (2000): 840. 7 Maycock, “The Bicultural Construction,” 227. 8 Maycock, “The Bicultural Construction,” 223.

Šárka Bubíková 19 among all the Garcías. In this way, Yolanda gains through immigration another voice, command of another language, another dimension of herself that helps her overcome the inevitable losses. By telling the story of the Garcías, Yolanda is assigning meaning to their present through their past and hopes to bridge the present with the possibilities of future. The novel’s focus on language and narrativity on one side, and on bi-cultural, bi-lingual, ethnic, fragmented selves of the migrant protagonists on the other make it a truly interesting, complex work that can be seen as an alternative to traditional immigrant novel as well as to female Bildungsroman. Acknowledgement The research for this paper was generously supported by the Fulbright Commission. Bibliography Alvarez, Julia. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. New York: Plume, 1992. Bess, Jennifer. “Imploding the Miranda Complex in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” College Literature 34 no. 1 (Winter 2007): 78-105. Castells, Ricardo. “The Silence of Exile in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” Bilingual Review 26 no.1 (January-April 2001): 34-42. Gomez-Vega, Ibis. “Hating the Self in the ‘Other’ or How Yolanda Learns to see her own kind in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” Intertexts 3 no. 1 (1999): 85+. Accessed through Academic OneFile, January 20, 2010. Hoffman, Joan M. “’She Wants to Be Called Yolanda Now’: Identity, Language, and the Third Sister in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingual. 23 no.1 (January-April 1998): 21-27. Král, Françoise. Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Levi, André, Weingrod, Alex, ed. Homelands and Diasporas. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005. Luis, William. “A Search for Identity in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” Callaloo 23 no. 3 (2000): 839-849. Mayock, Ellen C. “The Bicultural Construction of Self in Cisneros,Alvarez, and Santiago.” Bilingual Review 23 no. 3 (September-December 1998): 223-229. Yitah, Helen Atawube. “’Inhabited by Un Santo’: The Antojo and Yolanda’s Search for the ‘Missing’ Self in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” Bilingual Review 27 no. 3 (September-December 2003): 234-243. Šárka Bubíková received her PhD in English and American Literature at Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic and is currently the Head of the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. Her research interests include representations of childhood and coming of age in English and American fiction, the American literary canon and contemporary American ethnic literature. Author of a book on the American literary canon Amerika v literatuře, literatura v Americe, (America in Literature, Literature in America, 2007) and on the influence of the changing concept of childhood on literary production for children Úvod do studia dětství v americké literatuře (Introduction in the Study of Childhood in American Literature, 2009) and co-author of a collection of essays Literary Childhoods: Growing Up in British and American Literature (2008), she has published numerous articles, as well as a novel on Czech- American culture clashes Smaragdové město (Emerald City, 2006). She organizes annual cultural studies conferences at the University of Pardubice and she is the founding editor of the American and British Studies Annual.

20 Biting Divagations – Self-discoveries in Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs Petr Chalupský Abstract This article aims to explore the position of Ian McEwan’s novel Black Dogs (1992) within the corpus of his work. It attempts to show how this small in scale yet complex novel both follows and subverts the author’s characteristic themes and narrative strategies. It will also argue that, as the novel’s central concerns are the coming to terms with one’s past and the role of memory in this process, it in many respects anticipates McEwan’s most acclaimed work so far, Atonement (2001). Written soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Black Dogs ranks among his most politically engaged novels. Therefore, a special focus will be put on the author’s treatment of the theme of the often ambivalent relationship between private responsibility and public involvement that he touched upon in The Child in Time (1987) and later returned to in Amsterdam (1998). Keywords Contemporary British literature, Narrative strategies, Ian McEwan, Black Dogs, memory, childhood, loss of innocence The novel Black Dogs (1992) can be seen as representing a dividing line between Ian McEwan’s earlier and later literary production. Compared to the author’s early works, which are full of morbid, perverse and otherwise obscure action and imagery, and also to his late 1980s novels, Black Dogs is noticeably more ambitious since, “within the framework of a family dispute, it attempts to touch upon the clash of science and mysticism, rationality and magic, violence and love, and civilization and its abandonment. Within that same framework, it also delves into some of the major currents and events of the late-twentieth-century European history.”1 The novel develops the tradition already established in The Child in Time (1987) and engages the discourse and perspective of a psychological study and philosophical contemplation “in which different intellectual and moral positions are constantly in dialogue with each other.”2 Although it has some weaker points, namely the sometimes overtly schematised characters, Black Dogs does represent the beginning of the mature phase in McEwan’s literary career, which culminated in his most acclaimed works so far, Atonement (2001) and Saturday (2005). Although in terms of length it does not exceed McEwan’s previous works, Black Dogs is a complex novel since it explores the most characteristic themes and narrative strategies that appear in almost all his notable works: the theme of childhood, namely the childhood-adulthood transition and the consequences of neglectful or absent parents; the loss of innocence, not necessarily directly connected with the previous theme; strong and admirable female characters as opposed to their rather weak or pitiable male counterparts and, along with this, the fragility and preposterousness of patriarchal illusions; a related theme of the impasse of an exclusively rational approach to the world, mostly exemplified by the male protagonists; the belief that a single event of extreme physical, psychic and emotional intensity can fatefully alter and affect a life; a narrative strategy of escalated tension before the repeatedly postponed determining moment of 1 David Malcolm, Understanding Ian McEwan (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 132. 2 Malcolm, Understanding Ian McEwan, 138.

Petr Chalupský 21 action is described; a narration as if from the periphery of vision, from a detached, unconcerned perspective when something life-changing is happening; and a fragmentation of the narrative into separate moments of high intensity when plotline is abandoned in favour of the feelings and thoughts of a chosen protagonist. The novel not only employs the idiosyncrasies of its predecessors but also anticipates some themes of McEwan’s mature novels and therefore can be taken as a bridge between the author’s earlier and later work. The first of these themes is a concern with history, especially the period of and after the Second World War, which is, however, always seen through the prism of private anxieties and desires. Another important aspect is internationality, a state-of- the-person contemplation via a state-of-Europe narrative; compared to the author’s earlier works the novel puts much stronger emphasis on the role and nature of personal memory in the process of coming to terms with the past; it is also the author’s first metafictional work; and, written soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it ranks among his most politically engaged novels and as such it explores the theme of the often ambivalent relationship between private responsibility and public involvement and thus shapes “questions about moral responsibility for both a personal and a collective past.”3 The aim of this article is to show that Black Dogs represents, thematically rather than stylistically, a crucial point in McEwan’s career, one that not only synthesises his previous works but also anticipates his much-celebrated later achievements. The irreducible sense of childish unbelonging and unknowing idealism One of the central themes of Black Dogs is childhood, namely the relationships between parents and their children, which are, typically for McEwan, dysfunctional for various reasons. The novel is in fact full of characters whose fate has been crucially determined by the absence or inadequacy of parental care: the narrator Jeremy and his sister Jean who lost their parents in a car accident when they were little, Jean’s unfortunate daughter Sally who grew up in a strife-ridden household dominated by her violent, alcoholic father Harper, and Jeremy’s wife Jenny who, like her two brothers, suffered from a lack of care from their separated and irreconcilable parents. In the Preface Jeremy describes his anxieties and frustrations as an orphaned child, the loneliness, “emotional void” and “the feeling of belonging nowhere and to no one,”4 his permanent search for a surrogate parental authority and his naturally developed capacity to get on well with his revolting schoolmates’ parents, his hatred for the ruthless Harper and strong attachment to the abused little Sally. His traumatic childhood experiences cause Jeremy to mature early, though far from happily. He is haunted by his sense of guilt and betrayal for abandoning Sally when, insecure, aimless and restless, he went to study at Oxford. When he leaves university he goes through numerous jobs, addresses and love affairs in his futile search for a firm point in his life and thus “obscure [his] irreducible sense of childish unbelonging.”5 On one level the novel can be read as the narrator’s attempt to come to terms with the loss he experienced in his childhood, one that ‘has not only created emotional disturbance but also a disorientation’ leading him to “search for an answer 3 Anna Grmelová, “’About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters’: An intertextual reading of Ian McEwan’s Atonemen,” Litteraria Pragensia, 17, no. 34 (2007): 154. 4 Ian McEwan, Black Dogs (London: Vintage Books, 1998), 18. 5 McEwan, Black Dogs, 17.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 32 Without a thorough growth towards a balanced and independent personality any such charitable intention turns into an empty gesture of only political significance, an end in itself. McEwan emphasises the correlation between private responsibility and public involvement in which the first necessarily conditions the success of the latter, while their reversed causality does more harm than good. Jeremy perceives the relationship between official and private history from a different perspective when he wonders “at all the world historical and personal forces, the huge and tiny currents that had to align”37 to make his life what it has been and what it is like. He realises that there are forces, both devastating and productive, for instance June’s black dogs, that lie beyond our control and therefore we tend to attribute their meaning based on how they affect the domain of our personal experience. Paradoxical situations thus might appear when a tragic historical moment has a beneficial effect upon certain individuals’ lives. As in all McEwan’s works, in Black Dogs the ethical content is “embedded in disturbing fictions, in which a narrator may take up a position that is dubious or depraved”.38 The novel, however, occupies a distinctive position among them, as it can be understood as a crucial link between his earlier and later novels. In many respects it anticipates his most acclaimed mature novels that exemplify what Tamás Bényei denotes as the postmodern “tradition of the psychological novel by virtue of the psychological and ethical relevance of the speech situation that they present.”39 Though relatively small in scale, the novel explores a number of themes typical of its author’s mature works, but, most of all, through its symbolic meaning framework Black Dogs signals McEwan’s new central theme – what it takes to be a human being. “Human nature, the human heart, the spirit, the soul, consciousness itself – call it what you like – in the end, it’s all we’ve got to work with. It has to develop and expand, or the sum of our misery will never diminish.”40 Like Briony Tallis in Atonement and Edward Mayhew in On Chesil Beach, June and Jeremy make a discovery that is age-old yet always vital for the successful formation of personality – that the true value of all our acts consists in how they affect and relate to other people. Despite its bleak concluding paragraph and the recurrent motif of violence, the novel does express an optimistic belief in love as the redeeming force in human experience. Bibliography Bényei, Tamás. “The novels of Graham Swift: Family Photos”. In Contemporary British Fiction. 40-55. Edited by Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew. London: Polity Press, 2003. Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now: contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Childs, Peter. “Fascinating violation: Ian McEwan’s children”. In British Fiction of the 1990s. 123-134. Edited by Nick Bentley. London: Routledge, 2005. Childs, Peter, ed. The Fiction of Ian McEwan. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Grmelová, Anna. “About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters”: An intertextual reading of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Litteraria Pragensia 17, no. 34 (2007): 153-157. 37 McEwan, Black Dogs, 173. 38 Dominic Head, Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 258. 39 Tamás Bényei, “The novels of Graham Swift: Family Photos,” in Contemporary British Fiction ed. Richard J.Lane, Rod Mengham, and Philip Tew (London: Polity Press, 2003), 41. 40 McEwan, Black Dogs, 172.

Petr Chalupský 33 Head, Dominic. Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1985] 2006. Malcolm, David. Understanding Ian McEwan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. McEwan, Ian. Black Dogs. London: Vintage Books, [1992] 1998. McEwan, Ian. Atonement. London: Vintage Books, 2001. Reynolds, Margaret, and Jonathan Noakes. Ian McEwan: the essential guide. London: Vintage, 2002. Ryan, Kiernan. “Sex, Violence and Complicity: Martin Amis and Ian McEwan”. In An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction. 203-18. Edited by Rod Mengham. London: Polity Press, 1999. Petr Chalupský received his Ph.D. from the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. He is currently the Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Education, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, where he teaches English and British Literature, Literary Studies and Literary Theory. Specializing in modern British fiction, his research interests include especially the image of the city and its culture in contemporary British literature. He published articles in journals and conference proceedings, most recently “Crime narratives in Peter Ackroyd’s historiographic metafictions” in European Journal of English Studies (August 2010), and contributed to Literary Childhoods: Growing Up in British and American Literature (Pardubice, 2008). In 2009 he published a monograph The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night: the image of the city in the works of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan.

34 Sleeping in Beowulf Kathleen Dubs Abstract “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” As this well-known little prayer suggests, during actual sleep—while the conscious faculties are inoperative—the soul is at risk. Indeed, during sleep the body is also in danger, as the unconscious man is not alert to threat. Apparently sleeping can be a dangerous (in)activity. In the Old English poem Beowulf, actual sleeping occurs at critical points in the narrative, but always at night, or at least in darkness. Moreover, the traditional literary uses of sleep as a simulacrum of death also occur. But correlations among these concepts are not consistent. Beowulf usually fights at night, without sleep; he is, at least once, saved from death by his ability to stay awake. But he also fights during the day, though with different results. The monsters attack at night, in the darkness, so apparently they, too, do not sleep at night. But the dragon sleeps night and day until awakened, in the night, when he attacks regardless of the hour, though he is a night flyer. Thus much of the activity in Beowulf occurs at night, or in the dark, but the results are revealed only in the light of dawn. This paper investigates the different occurrences of sleep, in their various contexts, as well as in their relationships to light and darkness, and analyses their contributions to larger meanings within the poem. It concludes that sleep is a representation of inattentiveness, the result of which is usually fatal, physically as well as spiritually. Keywords Beowulf, Old English literature, sleep, darkness, night For decades, scholars of Beowulf have commented on the various uses in the poem of the words for and themes of light and darkness and day and night. It is also quite common to find discussions of the use of the term “sleep” for “death,” as this is a common topos throughout literature. But what does not seem to have attracted as much attention are the literal uses of “sleep:” a time for resting in a non-conscious state.1 As I looked into 1 With the exception of Hanchey, discussed at the end of this note, the use of sleep seems to have attracted critical commentary only in the context of the feast/sleep nexus. In “Swefan ćfter Symble: The Feast-Sleep Theme in Beowulf,” Neophilologus 65 (1981): 120-128, Harry E. Kavros argues that “themes in oral-formulaic poetry are traditional but not necessary” (p. 120), and focuses on the aesthetic impact of the “feasting- sleeping” theme in Beowulf and other Old English poems. Hugh Magennis focuses on lines 1004-1008, especially line 1008a (swefen), to argue that “sleep after feasting” means death after life. Hugh Magennis, “Beowulf, 1008a: Swefen,” Notes & Queries 29 (1982): 391-2. Marilynn Desmond investigates the MAH (monster attacks the hall) motif in the poem, focusing on Grendel’s attack, but does not analyze the implications of the connections (which I develop in my paper). Marilynn Desmond, “Beowulf: The Monster and the Tradition.” Oral Tradition, 7, 2 (1992): 258-83. See also Joanne De Lavan, “Feasts and Anti-Feasts in Beowulf and the Odyssey,” Lord, 191, 235-261, in which she focuses on the feast-sleep motif, arguing for the pattern of order (ritual) > disorder (anti-ritual) > order (ritual). Ginger Suzanne Fielder Hanchey, “Beowulf, Sleep, and Judgment Day,” M.A. Thesis (May 2008, Texas A & M University) presents an extended discussion, as the title indicates. Her argument seems to me weak, however, for two basic reasons: she assumes, first, an 8th century date of composition for Beowulf; second, she assumes that the poem is Christian, following in a context of Christian tradition. These assumptions are not uncommon. However, the comparative analysis she presents is with specifically Christian sources, both poetic and otherwise: “texts which share the Christian themes present in Beowulf.” (p.9). Thus “sleep, like any other kind of crime or moral failing, results in unfortunate consequences.” (p. 27). And the unfortunate consequence in Beowulf is, by analogy, Doomsday. Her analysis is both structural, based on the alliterative half-line, and thematic. Thus sleep “functions as

Kathleen Dubs 35 this concept, therefore, I discovered that, in Beowulf, when they sleep, characters suffer - not only humans, but unnatural and mythological beings as well. Further, with one exception, the fights in the poem - or those referred to by the poet – occur at night. These two observations suggested an inter-play among the concepts of sleeping/waking, night/day, darkness/light, and fighting. Thus I looked at how these inter-weavings might function and what they might reveal. This essay presents some of the conclusions I drew when I followed the threads of this interweaving in the following instances: • In his swimming contest with Breca, Beowulf fights the nicors at night, staying awake for five nights.2 • In Beowulf’s three fights in the poem, two are at night, one during the day. Significantly, it is the daytime fight which he loses - as does the dragon, himself a creature of the night. In fact, except for the fight with the dragon, Beowulf’s fights are repeatedly and emphatically presented as, if not at night, then in darkness. • Beowulf, Grendel, Grendel’s dam, and the dragon all share this common feature: they all fight at night.3 Grendel and the dragon are repeatedly referred to in connection with the night: the dragon is a night-flyer; Grendel stalks only at night; his dam attacks at night, and lives in a kind of eternal twilight. • Handscio is asleep, unaware, when snatched by Grendel. So is Ćschere, when killed by Grendel’s dam. So too is the dragon, when robbed by the thief. • The result of the night contests is always seen in the morning. • On only one occasion does the poet state that Beowulf sleeps: a well-deserved rest after the victorious fight with Grendel, before which he had deliberately feigned sleep in order to catch the creature off guard. • The poet also asserts that vulnerability while sleeping extends beyond the physical, and beyond the context of the poem. In order to demonstrate the interlacing of these elements, the structure of the essay follows the progression of the poem, although there are breaks in the chronology to indicate flashback, foreshadowing, and echo. Beowulf and Breca If we begin, then, with Unferđ’s challenge to Beowulf, we can see the emphasis on night and darkness. In questioning Beowulf about his exploit with Breca, Unferđ asks whether he is the same man who “on wćteres ćht / seofon niht swuncon” [“toiled in the broiling sea for seven nights” (515b – 516a)].4 It may be mere convention to mark time by night, as it is to mark years by winters. But when Unferđ asks Beowulf whether he has the a structural and thematic tool to illustrate Anglo-Saxon cultural preoccupations with vulnerability and justice.” (p.14) Specifically, “The many verbal and structural echoes in the two works make the application of Christ III to Beowulf a logical choice. The two may have used a shared source, or they may have drawn from a broader common tradition, or Christ III may have drawn directly from Beowulf.” (p. 11) My argument agrees with the fact that sleep often results in “unfortunate consequences.” It does not, however, go so far as to equate Beowulf’s “unfortunate consequence” with Doomsday. Unfortunately, the structural argument of the thesis suffers as well, as it omits several sources dealing with the pattern of feast/sleep/ death which she proposes (e.g. those cited supra). In addition, she does not consider the connections with light and darkness which I include. 2 Although presumably it was five days and five nights, the poet is specific in emphasizing night. 3 Though there is a time disjoint (outside/inside), it seems that the fight with Grendel’s dam is at night. This position is argued below. 4 Out of considerations for ease of access as well as accuracy, I have chosen the electronic version of the poem. Thus all quotations from the text are from Kevin S. Kiernan, Electronic “Beowulf.” 2 CD-Roms.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 60 past and its presence; writing not only with her own generation in her bones, but with the best of the tradition of English literature on her mind, feeling its simultaneous existence and communicating with it. Bibliography: Austen, Jane. Emma. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. --------- Persuasion. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2000. --------- Pride and Prejudice. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1992. Booth, Wayne C. “Point of View and the Control of Distance in Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16, 2 (Sept. 1961): 95-116. Eliot,T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1922). Accessed July 1, 2010. http:// bartelby.net/200/sw4.html ---------------- After Strange Gods. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934. Finch, Casey, and Peter Bowen. “The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury: Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma.” Representations, 31, Special Issue: The Margins of Identity in Nineteenth-Century England. (Summer 1990): 1-18. Jenkyns, Richard. A Fine Brush on Ivory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Lascelles, Mary. Jane Austen and Her Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939. Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover.’ Edited by Michael Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Mansfield, Katherine. Selected Stories. Edited by Angela Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Scott, Margaret, ed. The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. 2 Volumes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. O’Sullivan Vincent, and Margaret Scott, eds. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume I: 1903-1917, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. ------------ The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 2: 1918-September 1919. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. ------------- The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 4: 1920- 1921. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Sheehan, Colleen A. “Jane Austen’s ‘Tribute’ to the Prince Regent: A Gentleman Riddled ith Difficulty.” (2006) Accessed July 1, 2010, available from Jane Austen Society of NorthAmerica at http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol27no1/ sheehan.htm Woolf, Virginia. Common Reader 2. Accessed July 1, 2010. http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91c/ Janka Kaščáková is an assistant professor at the Department of English Language and Literature at Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia. She received her Ph.D. in English literature from Comenius University in Bratislava in 2007. Her research interests include 19th and early 20th century English literature, especially the works of Katherine Mansfield.

61 Sherman Alexie’s Version and Subversion of Native American Storytelling Tradition Marija Knežević Abstract Sherman Alexie understands writing as a means of fighting for the cultural identity of the American Natives against the dominant culture and also against the social compliance and lethargy of his own people. Since for him literature equals rage and imagination, the task of an artist is to be loud, poetic, cruel and inappropriate, in other words, to undermine mythologies. This assumption results in cruelly realistic work, for which reason Alexie is controversial. To non-native readers his voice is surprising and entertaining, but native readers often passionately disapprove of the images of natives Alexie depicts, as well as his distortion of the traditional narrative voice and its sacred function. What seems, however, to be the least traditional feature of Alexie’s work, an abundance of markers of popular culture, strikes me as a potent, though discomforting, challenge, inviting the reader, as good storytelling always does, to participate in the construction of meaning of our mutual present. Keywords Native American literature, Sherman Alexie, storytelling, trickster, popular culture, subversion In Sherman Alexie’s short story “A Drug Called Tradition” a storyteller teaches thus: Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you [...] Now, these skeletons are made of memories, dreams, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming [...] but no matter what they do, keep walking, keep moving. And don’t wear a watch. Hell, Indians never need to wear a watch because your skeletons will always remind you about the time. See, it is always now. That’s what Indian time is. The past, the future, all of it is wrapped up in the now. That’s how it is. We are trapped in the now [original italics.]1 These words are also a fitting introduction to Alexie’s work in general. His writing appears caught between the past and future, as it tries to realize its voice of he “now” and as its characters try to imagine themselves into existence within a palpable world. But he must first define the “now”, which to him appears as an elusive realm, much like Philip Larkin’s “time traditionally soured / a time unrecommended by event” (“Triple Time”). Replicating the situation in which an author tries to meet his community’s ethical call to reify traditional values in the relativistic world in which a creator in words sometimes feels trapped, Alexie’s work takes on an elusive shape, shifting from grief to delight, hopelessness to elation, from traditional storytelling to an avant-garde comics. In his book Sing with a Heart of Bear, Kenneth Lincoln introduces Alexie as a “stand-up trickster and postmodernist Washington Indi’n.” Lincoln quotes Lewis Hyde who in his book Trickster Makes This World says: “If the shaman in touch 1 Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 21-22.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 62 with higher spirits is the prophet of Native America, then trickster, his laughing shadow, is a prophet with difference.” The difference between trickster and shaman, Lincoln explains, “could be parodic realism, between shaman and priest, percentage of conviction. A priest carries the command of tradition, a shaman negotiates tribal margins and mainstream, a trickster parodies the priest’s aspirations and shaman’s bivalence.”2 Trickster energy helps Alexie negotiate the publishing industry and articulate Indian experience in an appropriated, alien form, but still in an authentic voice. Alexie’s tricksterish, carnivalesque, and parodic work comes from a combative impulse to dismantle controlling ideologies and radically revise the cultural identity of American Natives. Because, for him, literature equals rage and imagination,3 the task of an artist is to be loud, poetic, cruel and inappropriate, in other words, to undermine mythologies. Yet it is not only the invented Indian, as found for example in Edward Curtis’ photographs, which forces a successful Indian in white culture to be a fake Indian. The problem is also the social compliance and lethargy of natives, who Alexie believes live in a trap of someone else’s idea of what an Indian is supposed to be. In an interview with Katherine H. Wyrick, he explains that although more than 60% of Indians live in the cities, a very small part of Indian literature deals with the urban experience, thus substantiate their alienation from general culture. While negotiating boundaries between the two cultures – the tribal traditional and the urban global – Alexie’s work seems to have little to do with the traditional native narrative. Few traditional symbols are featured. Rarely may be found the tribal totem, salmon or the unavoidable trickster coyote, although the last may be found crucified and frozen on the wall of that stereotypical North-American chronotope the gas station. When these traditional symbols are invoked, they are introduced with shrill laughter, as if to ask “Is this what you expect me to do?” Already some of his titles, like Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Indian Killer or The Toughest Indian in the World, offer an ironical inversion of romantic expectations, revealing the contamination of history while destabilizing and reconstituting stereotypes, developing on a street rhythm rather than on shaman rhythms. Humour is almost universal trait of native stories and traditionally serves as celebration of culture and community. As Lincoln writes in Indi’n Humor, Indian humour has always been a weapon against assimilation. “Indians [...] laugh hard and deep among themselves and grimace around whites, exorcising pain, redirecting their suffering, drawing together against the common enemy – cultural ignorance.” The trickster figure, whom Lincoln calls “an antiheroic comic teacher and holy fool” helps fashion an image of “surviving Indian as a comic artist more than a tragic victim, seriously humorous to the native core.”4 Yet, understanding a “joke [as] a play upon form,” which “decentres the certainties of ‘structure’ [...] sets free the creative impulses that organize structure as play in the first place,”5 Alexie also dares to play with native traditional imagery and storytelling; his people often find his intentional frivolousness and the abject simplicity of his tricksters insulting. Instead of making stories that would bring communities together in a circle of common knowledge, Alexie’s self-described life writing has 2 Kenneth Lincoln, Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusion of Native and American Poetry (1890-1999) (University of California Press, 2000), 239. 3 Cf. Katherine H. Wyrick, “Crossing Cultures: Sherman Alexie Explores the Sacred and the Profane,” accessed August 14, 2008, http://www.bookpage.com/0306bp/sherman_alexie.html. 4 Kenneth Lincoln, Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5. 5 Jeanne Rosier Smith, Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature (Barkley – Los Angeles – Oxford: University of California Press, 1997), 64-65.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 86 the form of a large-scale quilt: a ground of unity on which squares represent the diversity of individual versions of the overarching story of “the gray ship and the brown girl.” Bibliography Agbo, Adolph H. Values of Adinkra Symbols. Kumasi: Ebony Designs and Publications, 1999. Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. Daniel, Janice Barnes. “Function or Frill: The Quilt as Storyteller in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” The Midwest Quarterly 41.3 (Spring 2000): 321-330. Duboin, Corinne. “Trauma Narrative, Memorialization, and Mourning in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata.” Southern Literary Journal 40.2 (Spring 2008): 284-304. Elsley, Judy. Quilts as Text(iles): The Semiotics of Quilting. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Horvitz, Deborah. “Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved.” Studies in American Fiction 17.2 (Autumn 1989): 157-167. Kelley, Margot Anne. “Sisters’ Choices: Quilting Aesthetics in Contemporary African American Women’s Fiction.” In Everyday Use, edited by Barbara Christian. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994. 167-194. Long, Lisa. “A Relative Pain: The Rape of History in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata.” College English 64.4 (March 2002): 459-483. Mitchell, Angelyn. The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women’s Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987. Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. New York: Vintage, 1989. Perry, Phyllis Alesia. Stigmata. London: Judy Piatkus Publishers, 1999. Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition.” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 28-59. Showalter, Elaine. “Piecing and Writing.” In The Poetics of Gender, edited by Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 222-247. Spaulding, A. Timothy. Re-Forming the Past: History, the Fantastic, and the Postmodern Slave Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. Karla Kovalová is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic. She holds an M.A. in English and French from Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic, and a Ph.D. in Modern Literature and History with the emphases on African American and African Studies and Women’s Studies from Drew University, Madison, NJ, USA. She is the author of To Live Fully, Here and Now: The Healing Vision in the Works of Alice Walker (Lexington, 2007) and European Scholars Teaching African American Texts (OU Press, 2008). She has also published a number of articles on black women writers in both Czech and international journals.

87 “You is got a monst’us heap ter l’arn yit”: Charles Chesnutt’s Revisions of Albion Tourgée’s ‘Carpetbagger’ and ‘White Negro’ Characters Christopher E. Koy Abstract Arguably the greatest advocate for Civil Rights among whites in the Reconstruction and post- Reconstruction periods, Albion Winegar Tourgée (1838-1905) influenced the African-American novelist Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) significantly. Both authors were born in Ohio, wrote fiction and nonfictional essays about the desperate situation of Blacks in the South during and after Reconstruction, and both ended their respective careers with a sense that their reception was either ignored or misunderstood. Keywords Civil Rights, racial relations, Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction, Albion Winegar Tourgée, Charles Chesnutt, “tragic mulatto” trope Introduction Albion Tourgée wrote two best-selling novels – A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks Without Straw (1880), both of which were written shortly after he had left North Carolina after residing there for fourteen years. A Civil War veteran and then an attorney who practiced law in New York, Ohio and North Carolina, he authored 18 novels in addition to his extensive political activism and legal work. Nearly assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan while serving as a judge on the North Carolina Supreme Court,1 he is today better known by legal historians for his crucial work on a landmark United States Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson in which he argued against the legalization of racial segregation. He lost the case as most liberal Americans at that point in the post-Civil War period pursued reconciliation with the South and, following the ideals of Booker T. Washington, accommodated Southern segregationists, much to Tourgée’s regret. In the same year that he argued before the Supreme Court (1896), Tourgée wrote the first anti-lynching law in the history of the United States (for the state of Ohio). In addition to his work in law and literary achievements, Tourgée shared with Chesnutt a commitment to the education of both African Americans and women. He helped found what eventually became a traditionally African American women’s school of higher education, Bennett College in Greenboro, North Carolina, and just before he left the state permanently, he successfully argued before the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1879 to allow a white woman, Tabitha Holton, to be admitted to the bar and work as a lawyer. Through Tourgée’s efforts, North Carolina became the first Southern state to admit women to the legal profession. Obviously, Civil Rights greatly interested Charles Chesnutt, though initially he was attracted to Tourgée’s literary achievements. Very little attention has been dedicated to their literary relationship at all. 1 W. McKee Evans, Ballad and Fence Rails: Reconstruction on the Lower Cape Fear. (New York: Norton, 1974), 146.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 88 Tourgée’s Career in Fiction-Writing Tourgée’s first published novel, Toinette, a Tale of the South (1874), written while Tourgée served on the North Carolina Supreme Court, deals with a white Southern lawyer, George Hunter, who cannot acknowledge his love for the heroine, his slave who bears their child. Hunter fights for the Confederacy and is nearly fatally injured early in the war but is nursed back to health by Toinette. When he attempts to renew their intimacy, she demands that he marry her first. He refuses and angrily denounces the idea, claiming her as his own property. She eventually escapes and as a runaway slave, passes for white and establishes herself in Oberlin, Ohio, a renowned station on the Underground Railroad and a longtime center for abolitionist political activism. This sentimental novel was only moderately successful, and did not have an especially striking plot. In contrast, Tourgée’s second novel, an autobiographical view of Reconstruction as perceived by a carpetbagger, bestowed on him celebrity status and a significant income. Published anonymously in November 1879 after he had moved to Colorado to work as a reporter on the Denver Evening Times, within six weeks, A Fool’s Errand became a national best-seller and the novel for which he is best remembered today. Readers curious to learn the identity of the author undoubtedly aided in the successful sales. This novel was followed up by his second best-seller only one year later. Bricks Without Straw told the story of Reconstruction from the point of view of two former slaves, concluding with a plea for greater Federal involvement in the South. None of his later works received either the acclaim or commercial success because, as Mark Elliott puts it, “Tourgée’s penchant for didacticism increasingly hurt his critical reputation as the rage for unsentimental realism in fiction took hold.”2 Chesnutt’s Reception of Tourgée The first reference by Chesnutt to Tourgée appears very early when Chesnutt was not only highly impressed with the $20,000 compensation for A Fool’s Errand but wished at a certain point to model his career after Tourgée’s, who was one of the leading novelists of that time.3 In his journal entry (dated March 16th 1880), Chesnutt directly argued that he knew the South and the black people better than two Northerners who wrote such well-received novels about the South: Beecher Stowe’s immensely successful Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) and Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand (1879): Judge Tourgée has sold the “Fool’s Errand,” I understand, for $20.000. I suppose he had already received a large royalty on the sale of the first few editions. The work has gained an astonishing degree of popularity, and is to be translated into the French. Now, Judge Tourgee’s book is about the South, - the manners, customs modes of thought, etc., which are prevalent in this section of the country. Judge Tourgee is a Northern man… [n]early all his stories are more or less about colored people, and this very 2 Mark Elliott, “Justice Deferred: Albion Tourgée and the Fight for Civil Rights” In: Chautauqua County Historical Society 6: 3-16 (2008): 11. 3 Ryan Simmons, Realism and Chesnutt: A Study of His Novels. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 174.

Christopher E. Koy 95 Conclusion Albion Tourgée influenced other writers besides Charles Chesnutt, but that influence was often like the response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s critics from the South with their anti-Tom novels; anti-carpetbagger novels by Thomas Dixon, for example, not only defended the Ku Klux Klan but celebrated their so-called defense of the white race and were well received by the public as evidenced by high sales. Chesnutt wrote a novel which served as a follow-up to A Fool’s Errand by depicting the situation in North Carolina one decade after the plot of Tourgée’s novel ended. By giving his hero the name “French” he alludes to both the ethnicity of the author Tourgée as well as that of Tourgée’s hero Servosse. Chesnutt revised the common “tragic mulatto” trope of the “white negro” depicted by Tourgée (and other white novelists), the mulatto who despairs of her or his partial black ancestry. With the character Donald Glover, Charles Chesnutt places the black community in a better light than even Northern whites. Bibliography Andrews, William. The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Chesnutt, Charles W. The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, Brodhead, Richard (ed.). Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. - - -. To Be an Author: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt 1889-1905. McElrath, Joseph R. and Leitz, Robert C (eds.). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. - - -. The Quarry, McWilliams, Dean (ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. - - -. Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line, William L. Andrews (ed.). New York: Penguin Classics, 2000. - - -. The Colonel’s Dream. New York, Random House, 2005. Duncan, Charles. The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998. Elliott, Mark. “Justice Deferred: Albion Tourgée and the Fight for Civil Rights” In: Chautauqua County Historical Society 6: 3-16 (2008). Evans, W. McKee. Ballad and Fence Rails: Reconstruction on the Lower Cape Fear. New York: Norton, 1974. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Simmons, Ryan. Realism and Chesnutt: A Study of His Novels. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Tourgée, Albion W. A Fool’s Errand. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Christopher Koy is presently completing his Ph.D. studies at Charles University in Prague with a dissertation on Charles W. Chesnutt. He holds degrees from Beloit College (B.A.) and the University of Illinois (M.A.). Co-author of Step-by-Step: angličtiny pro samouky (Fraus, 2002, 2007) and co-editor of the conference proceedings Dream, Imagination and Reality in Literature (JČU Ceské Budějovice, 2007), he has published chiefly on Jewish American and African American writers of the twentieth century as well as one article on activities aimed at preventing university students from committing plagiarism. Since 2006 he has taught American literature, Irish literature and practical language at the English Department of the College of Education, University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice.

96 Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love: the Invention of Tradition Bożena Kucała Abstract The article discusses Stoppard’s play as an instantiation of how literary tradition is invented. By problematising the processes of artistic creation, transmission (especially by means of verbal communication) and interpretation of literature, the play demonstrates that the emergence of tradition is not a matter of natural growth. Based on the biography of A.E. Housman, The Invention of Love presents his tentative attempts at identifying himself and, especially, at defining the nature of his commitment to another man. Housman’s self-perception is shaped by his knowledge of literature, and in particular classical culture. It is mainly in ancient poets that the protagonist finds models for his own feelings. In his own poetry, Housman also gives priority to fabulation rather than imitation of reality. It is argued here that both his creative and scholarly work as well as his private life exemplify a variety of the processes by which literary tradition is constructed. Keywords Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love, A.E. Housman, transmission, interpretation, tradition One of T.S. Eliot’s main objectives in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was to liberate the concept of tradition from its usual, denigrating association with the science of archaeology1 and to assert its living presence and invigorating influence on contemporaneity. Eliot argues that the whole European literature from Homer “has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order,”2 which results in creative interaction between past and present. This approach entails redefining the idea of tradition from a passive inheritance of the past to an active force engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the present. Hence Eliot stresses the need for an active approach to tradition: “It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”3 Implicit in Eliot’s argument is the idea that tradition changes in response to its new readings and re-readings, or, to use Hans Robert Gadamer’s term, in accordance with the changed “horizon of expectations”. Although literary tradition in the broadest sense comprises the entire written corpus, in practice only a small part of it becomes canonised and so acquires the potential to be transmitted and to shape successive literary works. The process of canon formation has attracted much critical attention, but the prevailing view is that it is a matter of more or less conscious selection, governed by fluctuating aesthetic and ideological criteria. To quote Harold Bloom: The Canon, a word religious in its origins, has become a choice among texts struggling with one another for survival, whether you interpret the choice as being made by dominant social groups, institutions of education, traditions of criticism, or, as I do, by 1 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt (New York and London: Norton & Company, 2000), 2395. 2 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 2396. 3 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 2396.

Bożena Kucała 97 late-coming authors who feel themselves chosen by particular ancestral figures. Some recent partisans of what regards itself as academic radicalism go so far as to suggest that works join the Canon because of successful advertising and propaganda campaigns.4 In The Invention of Tradition Eric Hobsbawm points out that much of what is taken for granted as the natural inheritance of the past was in fact once deliberately invented, constructed, and instituted formally: “the history which became part of the fund of knowledge or the ideology of nation, state or movement is not what has actually been preserved in popular memory, but what has been selected, written, pictured, popularized and institutionalized by those whose function it is to do so.”5 The fact that historians do not just report on the past “as it was” but construct narratives about it has long been acknowledged in historiography. But, as Frank Kermode argues in “Canon and Period”, historians of literature face the same problem of the impossibility of giving a neutral, objective account of the literary past.6 Tom Stoppard’s plays are an exemplary case of creative use of and dialogue with literary tradition, although the liberties he takes with it are probably not quite what Eliot envisioned. Sir Richard Eyre, director of the National Theatre from 1987 to 1997, described Stoppard as “[o]ne of those great emancipating figures” of contemporary theatre. In his opinion, Stoppard follows in the footsteps of Brecht and Beckett in expanding the possibilities of the medium: “... I think Tom has sort of taken Brecht – with whom he has no sympathy at all – and Beckett, and has simply seen, ‘Yeah, this medium: you can expand and contract, it’s a poetic medium that is fantastically flexible; you can throw your imagination at it and it’ll bounce back and amplify it.”7 One of Stoppard’s key methods of opening up the theatre to new options is throwing his imagination at literary and cultural tradition. Stoppard’s quintessentially postmodern play with literary and/or biographical material engendered some of the most important works in his oeuvre: Rosencrantz and GuildensternAre Dead, Travesties, Arcadia. The Invention of Love (1997), based on the life of A.E. Housman, exemplifies well the character of Stoppard’s inventiveness: textualised history and literary texts freely intermingle, giving rise to the intensely self-conscious literariness of the play. Due to its prominent biographical theme – Housman’s suppressed homosexual love for a fellow student – the play has usually been interpreted as a reflection on the duality of Housman’s life and personality, generated mostly by his socially unacceptable proclivities.According to Lawrence Frascella, the play has its secret centre in “Housman’s struggle, his loneliness, his repression of his gayness through the pursuit of sky-high academic standards.”8 Kate Kellaway writes in a review of the play that it is “not about the invention but the suppression of love.”9 Robert Brustein, somewhat annoyed at the excessive allusiveness of the text, establishes that “[w]hat Stoppard really wants to establish, aside from his own cleverness, is how gay men suffered under a repressive 4 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (London and Basingstoke: Papermac, 1995), 20. 5 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13. 6 Frank Kermode, “Canon and Period,” in History and Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 111-112. 7 As quoted in Jim Hunter, About Stoppard: The Playwright and the Work (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 222. 8 Lawrence Frascella, “Broadway: The Invention of Love,” Entertainment Weekly, April 14, 2001, 67. 9 Kate Kellaway, “Dreams and Spires,” review of The Invention of Love, New Statesman, October 10, 1997, 37.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 104 Ligurinus. Jackson, an unsophisticated heterosexual male, reacts with anger and disgust to Housman’s veiled declaration of love, and can hardly recall the erudite context of the scholarly discussion in the course of which Housman’s imagination was captured by Jackson’s affectionate gesture towards a dog. In accordance with the common association of homosexuality with Aestheticism after the scandal of Oscar Wilde, Jackson warily re-defines his friend: “You’re not one of those Aesthete types or anything – [...] how could I know?!”51 Jackson’s identification of Housman with the Aesthetes is wide of the mark, as Housman had little in common with the movement. In the play, Housman exchanges views with Oscar Wilde. This is a completely invented episode – according to what is known of their biographies, they never met in person. True to his reputation, Wilde boasts of having invented his own myth, proud of having turned his life into art: “The artist must lie, cheat, deceive, be untrue to nature and contemptuous of history.”52 Although his own lifestyle was radically different from Wilde’s, Housman will inevitably follow him to the other world, or to the domain of cultural tradition (“I will be coming later”53 ). AEH’s final monologue is a sample of the contingent material that constitutes the legacy of the past: snatches of ancient and contemporary classics, quotations, memories of significant contemporary events. Wilde’s closing words could also serve as a comment on the invented nature of the biography presented in the play: “One should always be a little improbable. Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.”54 Stoppard’s play demonstrates that the arbitrary, the provisional and the invented constitutes a substantial part of literary and cultural tradition. The paradox is that Stoppard’s works, playful and often irreverent in their approach to tradition, mixing fact and fiction, inventing episodes in real-life biographies, are already regarded as contemporary classics, and stand every chance of being incorporated into the tradition they toy with. Bibliography “A. E. Housman.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. Vol. 2. Edited by M. H.Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York and London: Norton & Company, 2000. 2041. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. London and Basingstoke: Papermac, 1995. Brustein, Robert. “Mind Over Material.” Review of The Invention of Love and Mnemonic. New Republic, May 14, 2001, 29-31. Davis, Deryl. “Look out Broadway.” Stage Directions 14, no. 8 (October 2001): 45-46. Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. Vol. 2. Edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. 2395- -2401. New York and London: Norton & Company, 2000. Frascella, Lawrence. “Broadway: The Invention of Love.” Entertainment Weekly, April 14, 2001, 67. Hobsbawm, Eric. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” In The Invention of Tradition. Edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. 1-14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 51 Stoppard, The Invention of Love, 77. 52 Stoppard, The Invention of Love, 96. 53 Stoppard, The Invention of Love, 97. 54 Stoppard, The Invention of Love, 102.

Bożena Kucała 105 Housman, A.E. Collected Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with Jonathan Cape, 1956. Hunter, Jim. About Stoppard: The Playwright and the Work. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Kellaway, Kate. “Dreams and Spires.” Review of The Invention of Love. New Statesman October 10, 1997, 37-38. Kermode, Frank. “Canon and Period.” In History and Value. 108-127. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Mandella, Bob. “‘Love’ Has 2 Faces.” American Theatre 18, no. 7 (September 2001): 76-78. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. Vol. 2. M.H. Edited by Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York and London: Norton & Company, 2000. Scott-Kilvert, Ian. A.E. Housman. Harlow: Longman Group, 1977. Sparrow, John. Introduction to Collected Poems by A.E. Housman. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with Jonathan Cape, 1956. Stoppard, Tom. The Invention of Love. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Treglown, Jeremy. “Those Who Can, TeachAlso:Art, Biography, Housman and History: the Instructive Quirks of Tom Stoppard.” Times Literary Supplement, October 10, 1997, 20. Bożena Kucała teaches nineteenth-century and contemporary English literature at the English Department of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her doctoral thesis analysed the concept of history and its representations in selected twentieth-century English fiction. Her academic interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, history and the novel, intertextuality. She has published articles (in English and Polish) on contemporary novelists, especially Graham Swift, A. S. Byatt, Peter Ackroyd and J. M. Coetzee as well as translated academic essays into Polish. She has also prepared a revised and updated edition of Bronisława Bałutowa’s book Powieść angielska XX wieku [The English Twentieth-Century Novel] and is currently working on her own book on intertextuality in neo-Victorian fiction.

106 “Myth is more instructive than history”: (Re)constructions of Biblical myths in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve Katarína Labudová Abstract The paper deals with The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter. Both writers show dystopian regimes which reconstruct Biblical myths since, as it is suggested in their fiction, totalitarian states abuse myths to represent women as passive victims and objects of desire and rescue. And because demythologizing involves remythologizing, Atwood and Carter attempt not only to refuse the representations of the past literary and mythological tradition but also to declare subjectivity for their heroines; women are represented in Nancy Roberts’ words “as rescuers rather than victims”1 . Margaret Atwood uses the genre of speculative fiction to depict the nightmarish Gilead, a fundamentalist totalitarian regime reconstructed from patriarchal narratives of the Bible and American Puritanism. The leaders of Gilead value women for their reproductive function as ‘two-legged wombs’. Atwood’s protagonist, Offred, although she has no real power to rebel against patriarchal prescriptions, claims her body and her memory as her own territory. Through her narrative she undermines Gilead’s myth of the silent passivity of women. Offred not only survives the oppression, she also re-writes the story of ‘walking ovaries’ into her own story of identity, denying the role of nameless Handmaid. In Angela Carter’s speculative fiction The Passion of New Eve, the Biblical myth of the creation of Eve from Adam’s body is remythologized by Mother, the leader of a group of militant feminists. A British man, Evelyn, is kidnapped and transformed through surgery into “the new Eve”2 by Mother, who is a genius surgeon as well. I focus here on intertextuality, which offers Atwood and Carter a strategy for reconstructing the gaps inherent in Biblical myths related to reproduction, creation of woman and infertility. Keywords Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Biblical myth, speculative fiction Talking Back Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter are both known for “talking back” to literary tradition.3 In this paper I would like to present how the two dystopias they create find ways out of the labyrinth of the dangers and powers of ideological interpretations 1 Nancy Roberts, The Schools of Sympathy: Gender and Identification through the Novel (Montreal and Kingston, London, Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 108. 2 Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (London: Virago, 1982), 70. All subsequent quotations from Carter’s The Passion of New Eve are from this edition with page numbers indicated in the text. 3 Nancy Roberts, in Schools of Sympathy, uses the phrase “talking back” in a sense in which both Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter courageously question and probe the status of the heroine both in the novel as well as in society. Roberts explains that she has taken the phrase from Bell Hooks’ book of the same name. Nancy Roberts, The Schools of Sympathy: Gender and Identification through the Novel (Montreal and Kingston, London, Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 107.

Katarína Labudová 107 of myths. In their rewritings of Biblical myths4 , Atwood and Carter not only refuse the prescribed roles and representations of women, they create types of women who challenge standards of patriarchal society. Both writers suggest a different view of female protagonists; they reject seeing women as passive “objects of speech and desire”.Atwood’s handmaids and as well as the Wives, Marthas and Econowives, are denied basic human rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of sexual behaviour. Nancy Roberts, in Schools of Sympathy, sees the work of Atwood and Carter as “representative of the attempt by women to claim subjectivity for themselves, to represent women as subjects of speech and of desire, as rescuers rather than victims”5 . I analyze Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (HT) and Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (PNE) as two examples of speculative fiction6 which hypothesize on the question What if Old Testament myths were literally reconstructed? In the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, the Biblical narrative of Sarah’s use of her handmaid, Hagar, as a surrogate womb for Abraham’s heir becomes the basis for the legalization of handmaids’ victimization. Atwood presents how the leaders of Gilead corrupted the original Biblical story to establish their vision. In a similar way, Angela Carter’s dogmatic leader of military feminists, Mother, reconstructs the Biblical myth of Eve’s creation from Adam’s body. Moreover, in Mother’s plan, the new Eve should also incorporate the new Virgin Mother. “Give me children or else I die” The Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale solves the problems of a decreasing birth rate by appropriating Biblical stories of the handmaid Bilhah, who is impregnated by her master, Jacob, married to Rachel. Leah, Rachel’s sister and Jacob’s first wife, had been fertile and blessed by God; but Rachel, the second wife, was thought to be infertile until much later. This is the myth the patriarchal regime of Gilead forces on its citizens: It’s the usual story, the usual stories. God to Adam, God to Noah. Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth. Then comes the mouldy old Rachel and Leah stuff we had drummed into us at the Centre. Give me children, or else I die. Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? Behold my maid Bilhah. 4 The term “Biblical myth” is used in terms of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (London: Penguin, 1999), where he discusses the relations of myths and literature. Frye sees the Bible as “the main source of undisplaced myth in our tradition” (140). In The Double Vision of Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) Northrop Frye distinguishes between Biblical myths and literary myths, suggesting that Biblical myths are “myths to live by” and Biblical metaphors “metaphors to live in” (16-17). Biblical myths are also analyzed in Words with Power: Being a second study of “The Bible and Literature” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), in which Frye studies “the relation of Biblical myth and metaphor to Western verbal culture, more particularly its literature” (98). 5 Nancy Roberts, The Schools of Sympathy: Gender and Identification through the Novel (Montreal and Kingston, London, Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 108. 6 Both The Passion of New Eve and The Handmaid’s Tale include elements from various genres, such as the picaresque novel, gothic fiction and romance. The term “speculative fiction” or SF can encompass other literary forms and sub-genres, such as dystopia, utopia, cyberpunk, space opera, etc. In my paper, speculative fiction is used to characterize Carter’s and Atwood’s novels because the “what if?” question typical of the genre is crucial to both novels. The two novels hyperbolize the extreme versions of “utopian” societies, Beulah in The Passion of New Eve and Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale. The disturbing versions of these alternative states are “analogic models”, which Darko Suvin discusses in “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre”. Suvin stresses the potential of speculative fiction to diagnose and warn about “possible alternatives”. Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English 34.3 (1972), 378.

Katarína Labudová 117 Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1996. Kerchy, Anna. “Fantastic Freakings: Decomposing Narrative and Deformed Femininity in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve.”.Palimpszeszt. http://magyar-iradalom. elte.hu/palimszest/24_szam/09.html. Web. 19 Apr. 2009. Lauter, Estella. Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Lyotard, Jean François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992. Mahoney, Elizabeth. ‘“But Elsewhere?’: The Future of Fantasy in Heroes and Villains”. The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism, ed. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997. Műller,Anja.AngelaCarter.IdentityConstructed/Deconstructed.Heidelberg:Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1997. Műller, Klaus Peter. “Re-constructions of Reality in Margaret Atwood’s Literature: A Constructionist Approach”. Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Ed. Nischik, Reingard. New York: Camden House, 2000. 229-258. Peach, Linden. Angela Carter. Houndmills, Basingtoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press, 1998. Prickett, Stephen. Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and the Biblical Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1986] 1988. Roberts, Nancy. Schools of Sympathy. Gender and Identification through the Novel. Montreal & Kingston, London, Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, The University of British Columbia, 1997. Sawyer, John F. A. (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture. Malden, Oxford, Victoria: Blackwell, 2006. Schneidau, Herbert N. Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1976. Sim, Stuart (ed.). The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English 34.3 (1972): 372-382. Staels, Hilde. Margaret Atwood’s Novels. A Study of Narrative Discourse. Tűbingen and Basel: A Francke Verlag, 1995. Sternberg, Meir. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The New American Bible. http. Accessed. 3 July 2009. Wilson, Sharon Rose. “Mythological Intertexts in Margaret Atwood’s Works”. Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Ed. Nischik, Reingard. New York: Camden House, 2000. 215-228. Katarína Labudová teaches Anglophone Literatures at the Faculty of Arts and Letters, Catholic University, Ružomberok, Slovakia. She is currently working on her PhD Constructions of Identity in Margaret Atwood’s and Angela Carter’s Novels at the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno. Her research interests include postmodernism, genre studies, fairy tales, text/body relations, monstrosity, embodiment and identity.

118 Challenging the Angel: Dramatic Defamiliarization in Angels in America Ivan Lacko Abstract Employing a montage of scenes, styles, and personal stories and plots, Tony Kushner’s monumental theatrical undertaking Angels in America offers a dialectical examination of end-of-the- millennium America. This paper attempts to explore how Kushner’s dramatic approach makes use of the dialectics inherent in the figure of the angel – with all of the implicit contradictions, paradoxes and ironies. Kushner’s aesthetic functions on the basis of recurrent defamiliarization and re-familiarization which, though Brechtian in essence, technically provides the author and, in turn, also the audience with a space where elements of the epic theatre mix with traditional Aristotelian structure to offer a paradoxical unity between Verfremdung and catharsis. The intentional subversion of traditional forms and concepts (such as the character of the divine messenger) allows the dramatic presentation of a whole variety of ideas, implications and perceptions. Keywords Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Bertolt Brecht, Verfremdung, epic theatre, subversion, angel The mind […] shouldn’t be able to make up anything that wasn’t there to start with, that didn’t enter it from experience, from the real world. […] Nothing unknown is knowable. Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, Act I, Scene 71 At the end of Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Prior Walter, the play’s protagonist and ‘prophet-to-be’ gasps in awe at the spectacular display of apparently supernatural powers in his bedroom and screams, terrified: “OH! PLEASE, OH PLEASE! Something’s coming in here, I’m scared, I don’t like this at all, something’s approaching and I… OH!”2 The invisible presence of the looming messenger fills him with feelings of horror, amazement and sexual arousal. Kushner’s stage directions here read: (There is a great blaze of triumphal music, heralding. The light turns an extraordinary harsh, cold, pale blue, then a rich, brilliant warm golden color, then a hot bilious green, and then finally a spectacular royal purple. Then silence.)3 The audience is invited to share this emotionally intense and visually stunning experience to be interrupted only seconds later by Prior’s involuntary and distracting 1 Tony Kushner, Angels in America, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches. Part Two: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 38. 2 Tony Kushner, Angels in America, 124. 3 Tony Kushner, Angels in America, 124.

Ivan Lacko 119 whisper: “God Almighty… Very Steven Spielberg.”4 Then the angel plummets through the ceiling, splendidly and magnificently, and announces her arrival which concludes Millennium Approaches. This diversion of the audience’s attention and disruption of their immersion in the magical final scene owes a great deal to Bertolt Brecht’s idea of Verfremdung, or estrangement, an illustrious and major tool of Brecht’s political theatre. Kushner’s politics very much draw on Brecht’s legacy not only in terms of how he approaches his material, but also in how he employs specific instruments to present this material to the audience. In Kushner’s plays, Verfremdung – as a device used in non-Aristotelian (or epic) theatre – functions in line with the classical dramatic structure employed in individual scenes. In this paper I will attempt to explore how Kushner’s dramatic approach makes use of the dialectics inherent in the figure of the angel – with all of the implicit and explicit contradictions, paradoxes and ironies. Kushner’s aesthetic functions on the basis of frequent defamiliarization and re-familiarization which, though Brechtian in essence, technically provides the author and, in turn, also the audience with a space where elements of the epic theatre mix with the traditional Aristotelian structure. The result is a dynamic dramatic style that offers a paradoxical unity between Verfremdung and catharsis. It is my aim to prove that there is a whole series of paradoxes or outright contradictions which allow Kushner to embrace human diversity and claim it as a principal driving force of progress. Epic configuration Kushner’s paradoxes provide a set of challenges which stimulate the plot and story, drive character development and dialogue, and help propel the play’s political message. With Angels in America, Kushner wanted to write a primarily dialectical rather than strictly non-Aristotelian play because for him, drama made in the Brechtian fashion is “like dialectical materialist analysis” and it is set to explore “the magic of perception and the political, ideological employment to which the magic is put”.5 The questioning, doubting and challenging of the classical building material for dramatic art provides the author with sufficient space to point out (without explicitly pointing his finger) relevant social, political and cultural issues of the last two decades of the 20th century and to bid the audience think about these issues deeply and critically. Art Borreca effectively argues that the influence of Brecht’s epic theatre on Angels in America is clearly visible in the play’s “episodic structure, emblematic and ‘ideologized’ characters, and theatrical montage, and in the use of these techniques to ‘estrange’ or ‘defamiliarize’ sociohistorical conditions in a particular place and time.”6 For Brecht, montage – a tool adopted from modernist fiction and widely used in film – ensured a disruption of the traditional unity of time and space. Brecht metaphorically compared montage to taking “a pair of scissors and [cutting the play] into individual pieces, which 4 Tony Kushner, Angels in America, 124. 5 Tony Kushner, “Notes About Political Theatre,” Kenyon Review, XIX/3-4 (1997): 27. 6 Art Borreca, “Dramaturging the Dialectic: Brecht, Benjamin and Declan Donnellan’s Production of Angels in America,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, ed. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 245.

Ivan Lacko 125 For Harper Pitt, this image reflects her own, very personal struggle with identity, Mormon upbringing and difficult familial relations. We do not get to see the end of this struggle, but her decision to undergo a radical change, however tough and wounding, propels her into a position similar to that of Paul Klee’s (and ultimately Walter Benjamin’s) angel of history. The web of souls patching up the hole in the ozone layer which she pictures refers not only to the link between the past and the future, ruin and reconstruction, death and birth, but also to the simple fact that all it sometimes takes is a different point of view and everything that seemed lost or unknowable can be instantly within a person’s reach. “I saw something only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things,”27 Harper says, realizing – and making the audience realize too – that being aware of oneself, taking notice of the structure and system of one’s being, and recognizing one’s limitations (e.g. when Harper understands that “nothing unknown is knowable”28 because the mind works only with the data it has encountered) is what makes one capable of personal growth. While the dialectical binaries inherent in Kushner’s angel of America become manifest in most of the play’s other characters who undergo major changes in their lives, it is the defamiliarization element, the awareness of what causes the changes and what their potential consequences might be, that sets all transformation in motion. In Kushner’s play, this does not necessarily mean metatheatre or metadrama, but rather a notion that the spectator (and/or member of society) ought to adopt the position of the angel of history – i.e. look at the past while moving away from it, not nostalgically, not cynically or disapprovingly, but with a sense that our understanding of a reality we are not part of may aid us in improving all sorts of other realities – including our own. Just like a society aspiring to reach the perfection of Raymond Williams’s ideal would require its members to live in it and at the same time view it from a critical and analytical distance. In this correlation of cathartic (involved) and critical (detached) experience, the worlds of Kushner’s politics and theatre meet. In both, the element of becoming critically aware of something we seem to know without realizing it extends our experience to new realms, just like Terry Eagleton says about literary language: “Most of the time we breathe in air without being conscious of it: like language, it is the very medium in which we move. But if the air is suddenly thickened or infected we are forced to attend to our breathing with new vigilance, and the effect of this may be a heightened experience of our bodily life.”29 In other words, if we are thrown off balance, if we lose our seemingly perfect mental, emotional and spiritual equilibrium, albeit for a brief instant, things that seemed unknowable may become known, and ultimately also, perhaps, understood. Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. Understanding Brecht. London: Verso Books, 2003. Borreca, Art. “Dramaturging the Dialectic: Brecht, Benjamin and Declan Donnellan’s Production of Angels in America.” In Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, edited by Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger, 245-260. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willett. London: Methuen, 1964. 27 Tony Kushner, Angels in America, 275. 28 Tony Kushner, Angels in America, 38. 29 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, 4.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 126 Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 1996. Fisher, James. Living Past Hope. The Theater of Tony Kushner. New York: Routledge, 2002. Gilloch, Graeme. Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002. Koepnick, Lutz. Walter BenjaminAnd theAesthetics of Power. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Kushner, Tony. Angels in America, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches. Part Two: Perestroika. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. Kushner, Tony. “Notes About Political Theatre.” Kenyon Review, XIX/3-4 (1997): 19-34. Nielsen, Ken. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008. Reinelt, Janelle. “Notes on Angels in America as American Epic Theater.” In Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, edited by Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger, 234-244. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Ivan Lacko is an assistant professor at the Department of English and American Studies at the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. He teaches courses in American studies and literature with particular interest in the correlation between our inner, personal world and the outer, social and political one.

127 From the Pictorial Turn to the Embodiment of Vision David Levente Palatinus Abstract The purpose of this paper is to map out the semiotic, cultural-historical and ideological discourses that constitute the theoretical framework of the study of visual culture, and to anchor the problem of response in an underlying phenomenology of perception. The article argues that the strong cognitive-emotional responses that images generate are indicative of the corporeal conditioning of aesthetics, which places the entirety of visual discourse into an anthropological perspective. Keywords visual culture, phenomenology of perception, semiotics, corporeality (Old-New) Concepts In the introductory chapter of his book An Introduction to Visual Culture, Nicholas Mirzoeff sums up the reasons for the establishment of visual culture as a distinct field of study: One of the most striking features of the new visual culture is the growing tendency to visualize things that are not in themselves visual.Allied to this intellectual move is the growing technological capacity to make visible things that our eyes could not see unaided, ranging from Roentgen’s accidental discovery of the X-ray in 1895 to the Hubble telescope’s “pictures” of distant galaxies. […] In other words, visual culture does not depend on pictures themselves but the modern tendency to picture or visualize existence.1 Barbara Stafford goes even further and describes the transformation of academic practices: The history of the general move toward visualization thus has broad intellectual and practical implications for the conduct of and the theory of the humanities, the physical and biological sciences, and the social sciences – indeed, for all forms of education, from top to bottom.2 In a similar fashion, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright observe in Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture that visuality “characterizes our age, because so much of our media and everyday space is increasingly dominated by visual images.”3 In accordance with the arguments of these prominent theorists, by now it has become a truism to say that over the past few decades, visuality, the proliferation of images and the emerging cultural influence of visual (or “new”) media have attracted increasing attention in literary and cultural studies alike. The presence of the visual and the influence 1 Nicholas Mirzoeff. An Introduction to Visual Culture. (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) 5. 2 Barbara Stafford. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) 23. 3 Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 370.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 128 of the exciting interdisciplinary field of visual culture, alternatively referred to as visual studies or visual literacy4 , have been addressed and put to theoretical and analytical use in the interpretation and description of everyday cultural practices. In close connection to this and with the expansion of literary studies into cultural studies, the critical discourses addressing questions of art and artifact have necessarily changed as well. The common feature of the sometimes disjunctive approaches was their attempt to counter- balance the alleged hegemony of textuality and to provide an alternative to a basically linguistic paradigm that has dominated the interpretative discourses within the humanities since the inception of structuralism and post-structuralism. The word “alternative”, however, suggests an inadvertent reiteration of the age- old image-word dichotomy. Throughout the history of culture, image and word have often fallen subject to a hierarchical ordering and have been thought of as competing, rival modes of representation. Even the language used to describe the interrelationship between words and images has been stigmatized since it draws extensively on the ideological construct of power and the vocabulary of political discourses: the use of words like rivalry, struggle, hierarchy, dichotomy and contest indicates the persistence of the rhetoric of the “ut pictura poesis” tradition in which the underlying concept of language allows for the verbal mastery of the visual field, where language ultimately envelops vision. As W.J.T. Mitchell writes, “pictorial images are inevitably conventional and contaminated by language” and, given the nature of the subject-matter, we are forced “to conceive of the relation between words and images in political terms, as a struggle for territory, as a contest of rival ideologies.”5 Later, in Picture Theory Mitchell reaffirms the formal incommensurability of the “signs or media of visual and verbal expression” and states that [t]he ‘differences’ between images and language are not merely formal matters: they are, in practice, linked to the differences between the (speaking) self and the (seen) other; between telling and showing; […] between words (heard, quoted, inscribed) and objects or actions (seen, depicted, described); between the sensory channels, traditions of representation, and modes of experience.6 Mirzoeff seems to echo Mitchell’s ideas when he observes that “western culture has consistently privileged the spoken word as the highest form of intellectual practice and seen visual representations as second rate illustrations of ideas.”7 Radical as Mirzoeff’s claim may be, it does not only indicate the frustrations of the art historian over the “absolutization” of language and textuality but is also symptomatic of a paradigm shift in the course of philosophical thinking, which Mitchell calls “the pictorial turn” in Picture Theory.8 Mitchell traces back the roots and early variations of this shift to the semiotics of Charles Peirce and to Nelson Goodman’s meditations about the “languages of art.” In Mitchell’s opinion these treatises of the visual become significant when they “explore the conventions and codes that underlie nonlinguistic symbol systems and […] do not begin with the assumption that language is 4 Cf. James Elkins. “Introduction: The Concept of Visual Literacy, and its Limitations.” Visual Literacy. Ed. James Elkins. (New York: Routledge, 2008) 1-11. 5 W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 43. 6 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994) 5. 7 Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture. 6. 8 Mitchell. Picture Theory. 11.

David Levente Palatinus 135 Bibliography Bal, Mieke. ’’Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture.” Journal of Visual Culture. Vol 2(1) (2003) 5-32. Elkins, James. (ed) Visual Literacy. New York: Routledge, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1 The Movement-Image. London: The Athlone Press, 1986. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. ’’Approaching Abjection” Trans. Leon Roudiez. The Portable Kristeva. Ed. Kelly Oliver. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 229-263. Lowry, Joanna. ’’Performing Vision in the Theatre of the Gaze.” Performing the Body/ Performing the Text. Eds. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson. (New York: Routledge, 1999) 273-283. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. - - -. Picture Theory. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. - - -. ’”Visual Literacy or Literary Visualcy?” Visual Literacy. Ed. James Elkins. (New York: Routledge, 2008) 11-14. - - -. What Do Pictures Want? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Peucker, Brigitte. The Material Image. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007. Stafford, Barbara. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996 - - -. ’’The Remaining 10 Percent: The Role of Sensory Knowledge in the Age of the Self- Organizing Brain.” Visual Literacy. Ed. James Elkins. (New York: Routledge, 2008) 31-59. Sturken, Marita and Cartwright, Lisa Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. David Levente Palatinus has a PhD from Peter Pazmany Catholic University, Hungary. He currently holds a lectureship in Twentieth-Century Literature and Film at the Department of English at the University of Ruzomberok, Slovakia. His research focuses on corporeality studies, forensic crime fiction and the phenomenology of perception.

136 Antebellum Sensational Novels and Subversion of Domesticity Jozef Pecina Abstract With the sensational novels of the 1840s, a new genre of popular fiction focused on life in cities appeared in America. Through grotesque humor, repulsive images and at times extreme perversity the authors of these novels intended to unmask the corruption and decadence of the ruling class. The first part of this article traces the development of sensational novels and the achievements George Thompson, the most prolific author in this genre. The second part of the article focuses on the subversion of domesticity in Thompson’s novels. Domestic novels of 19th century usually trace the success of a virtuous heroine who overcomes all kinds of difficulties and personal misfortune and, often guided by a strong Christian faith, moves to middle-class marriage. The sensational novels of George Thompson move in a different direction and subvert social norms of the era. His narratives deconstruct marriage and family, with households frequently being split apart as a result of the perverse activities of one or both spouses. Thompson’s novels do not end in domestic bliss, but with sensational and disturbing images. In this article I focus on the subversion of domesticity in two of Thompson’s novels – Venus in Boston and City Crimes. Keywords sensational novels, subversion, antebellum era, family, deconstruction In early nineteenth century America, the hunger of the public for sensationalism was fed on the mass scale for the first time. Freedom of the press, embedded in the First Amendment of the Constitution, enabled newspapers to report on shocking stories, which was not possible in more repressive societies. Improvements in printing technology facilitated the publication of various kinds of literature which reflected the taste of working-class readers. Popular newspapers made a dramatic shift toward the sensational, and crime literature enjoyed increasing popularity. As a result, the antebellum public was provided an increasingly repulsive diet of horror, gore and perversity in the penny papers and in the closely associated genres of crime pamphlets and later also in sensational novels. Penny newspapers that pioneered the emergence of sensationalism appeared in the 1830s. The first were New York’s Morning Post and Sun, but it did not take long before every major American city had one or more of these newspapers. Sold for a penny, they replaced the more respected sixpennies and were aimed at the pockets of America’s growing working class. Many of the strategies that characterize present-day tabloid newspapers – human interest stories, a fascination with sex and crime, the use of vernacular language, and an indifference to respectable opinion – can be traced to the penny newspapers of 1830s.1 The most notorious of them was James Gordon Bennet’s New York Herald which appeared in 1835. Bennet was able to make, for example, a courtroom trial of people of no social standing (such as young clerk accused of murdering a prostitute) into an impressive national saga. He quickly earned a reputation for nastiness and coarseness. Foreign commentators noted that “the more respectable the city in America, the more infamous, the more degrading and disgusting, we have found to be its 1 Jim Cullen, The Art of Democracy (New York: Monthly Review Press), 47.

Jozef Pecina 137 Newspaper Press.” 2 The New York Herald thrilled its readers with daily reports of tragedies and crimes in such an extent that Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in his journal “What sickening details in the daily journals!” 3 Soon in the wake of the penny press the sensational novels arrived. They were not an American invention (Eugene Sue’s Les Mystéres de Paris appeared in 1842.), but these novels had a distinctive flavor in America. The publishers of the sensational genre competed fiercely for an audience and experimented with various types of fiction. The first genre that attracted a wide following was the city mysteries. Novels in this genre uncovered tales of criminal underworlds or the luxuries and decadence of the rich.4 One of the first of these exposés, George Lippard‘s The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monk Hall (1845), sold more than 60,000 copies in its first year, making it the most popular novel in the United States before the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Between 1845 and 1860, more than fifty city mysteries appeared. The most popular settings were Boston, New York and Philadelphia, but authors exploited other American cities, among them St. Louis, San Francisco, New Orleans and Rochester. During this period, several other popular writers (such as George Thompson and Ned Buntline) forged a distinctly American unrestrained style characterized by grotesque humor, extreme perversity and nastiness, and thematic subversiveness. The genre of domestic fiction had been around long before the sensational novel. One of the first domestic novels in America, Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, was published in 1794 and it became a great bestseller. Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) were also quite successful. These novels, classified by David Reynolds as Conventional, praised the home, family, good works as well as Christian virtues such as submission and endurance.5 The stories usually followed the fate of a pious and virtuous heroine striving to overcome personal misfortune, finally ending with a bourgeois marriage. In domestic novels, home was an ideal to be achieved and marriage was a kind of reward for virtuous behavior.6 Although today less studied than the domestic genre, sensational novels were at least as popular and as culturally significant. A number of them (e.g. Lippard’s The Quaker City and George Thompson’s City Crimes) sold as many copies as the most popular domestic novels, which usually sold for a dollar and was targeted toward the middle-class Victorian household. The sensational novel sold for twenty-five cents and was peddled everywhere – from stores to sidewalk stalls to railroad stations, so the cultural impact of these fictions may have been even greater. The target audience, of course, was the working class. The sensational genre did not escape the attention of major writers of the period – Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, employed several themes typical for city mysteries in his short stories. But despite the significant impact on popular culture of the antebellum era, these works were ignored by literary critics for a long time. Several reasons explain this neglect. First of all, many examples of the genre disappeared, since sensational fiction was intended for rapid reading and rapid disposal. Furthermore, prudish censors, fighting against anything even remotely associated with pornography destroyed the plates used 2 David Reynolds, Beneath the American Rennaissance. The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 172. 3 David S. Reynolds, “Introduction”, in George Thompson, Venus in Boston and other Tales of Nineteenth- Century Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), XXXII. 4 Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents (London: Verso, 1987), 85. 5 Reynolds, Beneath the American Rennaissance, 182. 6 Reynolds, “Introduction”, XXXIV.

Jozef Pecina 143 Bibliography Cullen, Jim. The Art of Democracy. A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996. Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents. Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. London: Verso, 1987. Reynolds, David, S. Beneath the American Renaissance. The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. - - -. Introduction. In: Thompson George, Venus in Boston and other Tales of Nineteenth- Century Life. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Thompson, George. Venus in Boston and other Tales of Nineteenth-Century Life. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Jozef Pecina teachesAmerican studies at University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovakia. His main fields of interest are 19th centuryAmerican history and Popular Culture. He is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on the image of war in 19th century American novels. He has published articles on Captain John Smith, Stephen Crane, John William DeForest and antebellum sensational novels.

144 Like a grain of sand irritating an oyster. Howard Jacobson‘s The Very Model of a Man and the Bible. Ewa Rychter Abstract For contemporary novelists rewriting the Bible (e.g., for Winterson, Barnes, Roberts, Crace or Diski), Scripture proves a potent irritant with which contemporary literature can still maintain a lively, interactional relationship. Far from being taken for granted, neglected, plundered, the Bible functions as a grating cultural presence approached with a sense of both abrasion/unease and incorrigible attachment. This paper focuses on Howard Jacobson’s The Very Model of a Man (1992), a novel rewriting the biblical narrative of Abel and Cain, and examines the ways in which the novel plays out its attachment and detachment, friction and acceptance of the Bible. It is argued that the complex character of the novel (written by a Jewish born British author) derives from midrash (a rabbinic mode of reading and relating to Scripture), a form not unknown in English literary tradition. Drawing on those theories of midrash which emphasise the culture- bound, historically conditioned position of the Bible reader, the paper investigates the ways the scriptural “irritant” is filtered through/inflected by the cultural milieu of its late twentieth- century reader. Keywords the Bible, midrash, subversion, contemporary novel According to Terry T. Wright, rewriting the Book of Genesis involves “wrestling” with the biblical text.1 Wright’s phrasing suggests that a novelistic re-scripture of the Book of Genesis resembles the patriarch Jacob’s wrestling with an angel, in that it neither rejects nor submits to the ancient text but preserves a creative tension between itself and the Bible. Such novels play the tug-of-war with Scripture, the effect of which is that the desire to overpower the parent-text and the sense of being overpowered by the Bible are kept in precarious balance. Theirs is the “Genesis of Fiction” (as Wright puts it in the title of his book), the simultaneous engendering of biblical stories and coming to terms with being engendered by the first book of the Bible, the respect for tradition and the readiness to subvert it. Though Wright does not discuss Howard Jacobson’s The Very Model of a Man (1992), a novel rewriting the biblical narrative of Abel and Cain, his statements can shed light on the manner Jacobson reads the Bible. Like Jacob from the Book of Genesis, Jacobson is a wrestler who will rather become crippled in the confrontation with the powerful text than give up on the struggle. His reading-as-wrestling feeds on conflict, violence and daring; it searches for the Bible’s potentially weaker points – its equivocalities, gaps, and extravagancies – insinuates itself into those places, twisting their meanings or challenging their traditional reception. “The Lord was our shepherd. We did not want,” we are told at the very beginning of the novel. “He fed us in green and fat pastures, gave us to drink from deep waters, made us to lie in a good fold. That which was lost, He sought; that which was broken, He bound up; that which was driven away, He brought again into the flock. Excellent, excellent, had we been sheep.”2 By reading the pastoral metaphor against the grain, 1 Terry T. Wright, The Genesis of Fiction: Modern Novelists As Biblical Interpreters (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 1. 2 Howard Jacobson, The Very Model of A Man (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 1.

Ewa Rychter 145 Jacobson strikes at the taken-for-granted readings of the passage: on his account, the idea of divine shepherding connotes stalking or excessive control rather than safety, and combines with the idea of sheepish followers rather than independent believers. Also, “to be a sheep in the biblical world is an ambiguous fate”3 because lambs are fed and looked after to ultimately become sacrificial offerings. “The destiny as lamb chops [...,which] undermines the image of security [...the original biblical passage] has been at such pains to establish”4 , lays a menacing shadow on the life of God’s flock in The Very Model of a Man. Throughout his novel, Jacobson exposes the poverty of Abel’s lamb-like posture, the manipulatory character of God-the-Shepherd’s interventions into Adam’s, Eve’s and Cain’s lives, and the sacrificial status of humans, whose ends are known long before men and women reach the stage of decision-making. We may say that Jacobson revisits the Bible in a spirit of bitter irony, violating its pieties, mocking its metaphorical certainties, debunking the iconic status of some of its ideas. Jacobson critically probes the Bible’s fissures and yet, his subversions remain “strange secular attachments to, in detachment from, the biblical text.”5 Jacobson’s dislike for complacency (Abel’s and Babel-dwellers’) and for “punctilious”6 observation of reason- offending laws, mark his distance from the biblical ideas he nevertheless explores from within the framework of the biblical original. Jacobson tries to avoid the crime his main character commits – unlike Cain, he neither eliminates the opponent nor silences ideas he does not share. Cain was “literal enough to insist that [...his] view must alone prevail, and his punishment is identical with his crime – single-mindedness. Single. Mindedness.”7 Once he rises “against his own yearning [...] to enjoy and suffer disjunction”8 and kills his brother, Cain suspends for himself the life-energising principle of opposition (“Opposition is the beginning and the end of us.”9 ) and spends the rest of his days among polite, complacent and characterless citizens of Babel. In contrast to Cain, Jacobson never relinquishes his yearning to “enjoy and suffer” the disjunction from the Bible. He wrestles with, rather than murders the ancient text. His rewriting of Scripture is simultaneously irreverent (or heterodox) and attentive (or dedicated) to the parent-text. His sympathising with outcasts (with Cain, Esau, Korah) is the badge of his late modern, dissenting sensibility, while the fact that he focuses on biblical dissenters puts him in line with those who read the Bible (reverently or otherwise) and who, by doing that, maintain the relationship between the secular and the scriptural. Jacobson’s wrestling with the Bible: re-scriptures and subversions Jacobson’s wrestling with the Bible (and, paradigmatically, his struggling with the ancient story of Jacob struggling, which he changes into Eve comically wrestling with an angelic rapist), is exceptional neither in style nor in the choice of narratives. As Valentine 3 Hugh Pyper, “The Triumph of the Lamb: Psalm 23 and Textual Fitness,” Biblical Interpretation 9 (2001): 388. 4 Pyper, “Triumph of the Lamb,” 388. 5 Yvonne Sherwood, A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives. The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 200. 6 Jacobson, Very Model, 302. 7 Jacobson, Very Model, 286. 8 Jacobson, Very Model, 286. 9 Jacobson, Very Model, 55.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 156 Bibliography Boyarin, Daniel. “Inner Biblical Ambiguity, Intertextuality and the Dialectic of Midrash: The Waters of Marah.” Prooftexts 10 (1990): 29-48. Boyarin, Daniel. “Midrash and the ‘Magic Language’: Reading Without Logocentrism.” In Derrida and Religion. Other Testaments, edited by Yvonne Sherwood, Kevin Hart, 131-140. New York: Routledge, 2005. Bruns, Gerald L. “Midrash and Allegory: The Beginnings of Scriptural Interpretation.” In The Literary Guide To the Bible, edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, 625- -646. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987. Cunningham, Valentine. In the Reading Gaol. Postmodernity, Texts, and History. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. - - -. “The Best Stories In the Best Order? Canons, Apocryphas and (Post)Modern Reading.” Literature and Theology 14 (2000): 69-80. Fishbane, Michael. The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Gruenwald, Ithamar. “Midrash and the ‘Midrashic Condition’: Preliminary Considerations.” In The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History, edited by Michael Fishbane, 6-19. New York: State University of New York Press, 1993. Hartman, Geoffrey. “Midrash as Law and Literature.” In The Geoffrey Hartman Reader, edited by Geoffrey Hartman and Daniel T. O’Hara, 205-218. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. Jacobson, Howard. The Very Model Of A Man. London: Penguin Books, 1993 (1992). Josipovici, Gabriel. The Book of God. A Response to the Bible. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. Kugel, James. “Two Introductions to Midrash.” Prooftexts 3 (1983): 131-155. Pyper, Hugh. “The Triumph of the Lamb: Psalm 23 and Textual Fitness.” Biblical Interpretation 9 (2001): 384-392. - - -. “The Selfish Text: The Bible and Memetics.” In Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies: The Third Sheffield Colloquium, edited by Cheryl Exum and Stephen D. Moore, 70-90. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press (1998). Sherwood, Yvonne. A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives. The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Stern, David. “Midrash and Indeterminacy.” Critical Inquiry 15 (1988): 132-162. - - -. Midrash and Theory. Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies. Evanstone, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Twomey, Jay. “A Funny Thing Happened On the Road to Damascus. Piety and Subversion in Johnny Cash’s Man In White.” In Subverting Scriptures. Critical Reflections on the Use of the Bible, edited by Beth Hawkins Benedix, 11-22. New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2009. Wright, Terry T. The Genesis of Fiction: Modern Novelists as Biblical Interpreters. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Ewa Rychter is Senior Lecturer at the The Angelus Silesius State School of Higher Vocational Education in Wałbrzych, Poland. She received her M.A. from the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław in 1996, and was awarded a doctorate degree in literary theory at the University of Silesia in 2002. In 2008, she completed Biblical Studies at the Pontifical Faculty of Theology in Wrocław. She is the author of a monograph (Un)Saying the Other: Allegory and Irony in Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethical Language (Peter Lang: Frankfurt am Main, 2004) and the editor of a volume of essays on post-theory (in

Ewa Rychter 157 Polish, Po(granicza) teorii, Wałbrzych 2010). She is also the author of twenty articles on literary theory, contemporary philosophy, the Bible in contemporary culture, as well as on some contemporary British novelists (Winterson, Barnes, Barker). She teaches English literature and literary theory.

158 On Reading, Readers and Authors Krystyna Stamirowska Abstract Reading is such a common activity that, apart from the literary critic, one hardly considers its nature or reflects upon its purpose or uses. Yet it is through an encounter with a literary work that we gain access to new worlds and make contact with imaginary people and places; and, also, although indirectly and unconsciously, enter into a dialogue with the implied author – a figure both familiar and unfamiliar who is our invisible guide. The paper thus reflects on the nature of reading and the role of literature in contemporary life. Keywords reading, George Eliot, Adam Bede, modernism, critic The reading contract Since our first encounters – usually mediated by parents – take place in our early childhood, reading soon becomes a familiar experience which we take for granted. Fairy tales, stories, poems which we consume, sometimes indiscriminately, easily become a part of our daily fare. We travel back in time, enter foreign lands, encounter foreign people, to depart after a while and to return once again. L.P. Hartley in the opening line of his famous novel The Go-Between put it aptly: ”The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. Yet this difference attracts: one easily makes adjustments to the foreignness which inspires curiosity and vicariously extends our range of experience. Later we may reflect upon the nature of reading which, despite being strongly integrated into the framework of our existence, is a complex process which engages our faculties not only of understanding but also our imagination, memory and empathy, and finally, requires an emotional and ethical response. Even though we engage in reading as a matter of course, we do not pay much attention to the nature or conditions of this process. And since reading is, predominantly, a silent and solitary activity, we remain unaware that it does involve a dialogue: with the past and the present, with the characters and the author, and, finally, with ourselves. Our degree of involvement, our reactions and responses, require concentrated attention and an active attitude, and, primarily, our unspoken (and purely intuitive) acceptance of the paradoxical nature of reading based on what Coleridge calls a “willing suspension of disbelief”. Without this temporary suspension of our natural reluctance to accept fiction as truth, to obliterate the gap which lies between the written word and the world of our experience, a successful reading and the ultimate response which we take for granted would not be possible to achieve. Once we shut off the pressures of daily reality, the literary representation, temporarily, takes precedence over empirical life, and the complex process of participating and indeed becoming immersed in the fictional world goes on until the final moment (of epiphany) which Joyce, after Thomas Aquinas, calls “claritas”, and which Aristotle, in the context of his discussion of tragedy, refers to as “catharsis’. To Aristotle, achieving catharsis depends on the success of mimesis, whereby the link between the two is firmly established. Aristotle’s Poetics made clear the paradoxical nature of both writing and reading and of potential dangers inherent in the mimetic practice, but it rarely interfered with the writers’ task; there have been, however, exceptions, like Laurence Sterne, who felt obliged to communicate this awareness by compromising verisimilitude and employing

Krystyna Stamirowska 159 a metafictional level of narrative in Tristram Shandy. Nineteenth century novelists were particularly concerned about getting their meaning across, and often sacrificed technical nuances in order to highlight whatever they considered a priority, namely, the ethical dimension and the moral appeal. As regards making contact with the reader, this clarification of intention was all-important. Apart from a direct contact through public readings, there were also Prefaces to the novels in which the author could explain his purpose; and authorial intrusions giving instructions to the reader inserted within the text itself were an established practice. The problem of “deception” was also tackled, although less frequently. One of the most famous examples of confronting this by addressing the reader from within the story, to inform him of the transaction and ask him to accept its conditions, is the opening of Adam Bede: WITH a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.1 The process of transforming, by means of a pen and a drop of ink, a material setting as imagined by George Eliot into an image that can be visualized by the reader is likened to a magician’s practice. The metaphor makes use of the elements involved in a mimetic act: the author, reader and the object of representation, familiar to both the author and reader, yet subjected to a transformation. The object, originally perceived by the author, is being retained as an image in memory, then retrieved for the purpose of description in the language shared by both parties, and then, after being de-coded by the reader, produces a relevant visual image which will, in the course of further reading, contribute to a concretization of the fictitious universe. The metaphor of a drop of ink, in which the workshop might be reflected, evokes another well known metaphor of “the mirror held up to nature”, and thus helps familiarize the analogy. Another example from the same novel (the opening of Chapter 17) is framed as a response to imaginary criticism from a reader both eager to receive a more edifying view of human nature and complaining about the deficient character of a clergyman, the Rector of Broxton. The clergyman fails in his duty to correct Arthur Donnithorne’s wicked ways. The writer defends herself by declaring her absolute commitment to truth- telling: Certainly I could, my fair critic [put different words into the clergyman’s mouth], if I were a clever novelist, not obliged to creep servilely after nature and fact, but able to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, my characters would be entirely of my own choosing, and I could select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman, and put my 1 George Eliot, Adam Bede (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood and Sons, undated edition), 1.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 168 Bibliography Conrad, Joseph. The Nigger of the Narcismus. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood and Sons, undated edition. Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. London: Macmillan, 1967. Johnson, B.S. Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs. London: Hutchinson, 1973. Johnson, Pamela Hansford. “The Sick-room Hush over the English Novel.” The Listener 42 (11 August 1949): 235-36. Orel, Harold (ed). Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings. London: Macmillan, 1967. Pinney, Thomas (ed). Essays of George Eliot. London: Routledge, 1968. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What is Literature? Transl. by B. Frechtman. London: Methuen, 1986. Schwarz, Daniel R. The Case for a Humanistic Poetics. London: Macmillan, 1990. Sarraute, Nathalie. The Age of Suspicion. Transl. by Maria Jolas. New York: George Braziller. 1963. Sontag, Susan. A Roland Barthes Reader. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982. Steiner, George. Language and Silence. London: Faber and Faber, 1963. Thackeray, William. Vanity Fair. London, Edinburgh and New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, undated edition. - - -. The History of Pendennis. London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1879. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1970. Wilson, Angus. “Diversity and Depth.” Times Literary Supplement 15 August 1958. Professor Krystyna Stamirowska is the Head of Contemporary English Literature and Culture Department of the Institute of English Philology, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. She specializes in (and also teaches) the twentieth century and contemporary English Literature. She has completed supervision of nine PhD theses, and supervises four other graduate students. Apart from numerous articles and chapters in books, including five essays on Ishiguro, she is the author of books Representations of reality in the post-war English novel 1957-1975, (Universitas, Krakow 1992) and B .S. Johnson’s Novels: A Paradigm of Truth (Universitas, Krakow 2006). She also edited Współczesna powieść brytyjska (Universitas, Krakow 1997) and Historia, fikcja, (auto)biografia (Universitas, Krakow 2006) and co-edited Images of English Identity 1800-1960 (with Andrzej Branny and Anna Walczuk, Universitas, Krakow 1998).

169 Type, Allegory, Symbol: Jonathan Edwards and Literary Traditions Anna Světlíková Abstract This article examines the rhetorical form of Jonathan Edwards’ (1703-1758) natural typology. Edwards, one of colonial New England’s most prominent thinkers and theologians, apparently believed he was taking a bold step outside the well-established tradition of Calvinist typology, an exegetical principle based on figurative interpretation, when he argued that not only the Scripture but the created world also typologically represents divine truth. Contemporary scholars often see the natural “type” as a kind of proto-symbol, uniting mind and nature in a moment of transcendental perception. However, the rhetorical structure of Edwards’ type suggests that it is closer to the emblematic tradition than to symbol or metonymy. While Edwards’ theory of typology might have been innovative, the literary form of the type remained traditional. The discrepancy between the content and form of Edwards’ natural typology gives us a more complex understanding of his position with respect to the allegorical and symbolist traditions. Keywords Jonathan Edwards, type, allegory, symbol, emblem The purpose of this paper is to consider how Jonathan Edwards’ natural typology might be described in literary terms, in other words: what is a natural type from a rhetorical perspective, and to examine what a rhetorical interpretation suggests about the position of Edwards’ texts with respect to some of the pertinent literary traditions. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was a New England theologian, preacher and philosopher and is considered one of the leading figures in the intellectual history of colonial New England. In his times, Jonathan Edwards was famous and infamous both for his involvement in revivals of religion in New England and for defending traditional Calvinist doctrines such as original sin or predestination. For subsequent generations, Edwards – most notably his famous sermon entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” – has often come to embody all that was negative about America’s Puritan heritage. Others have continued to uphold Edwards as a fascinating thinker. Among the issues which literary scholars nowadays find relevant are various aspects of Edwards’ homiletic practice (problems of imagery, style, and rhetoric), Edwards’ engagement with contemporary polite culture, his influence on subsequent writers as well as feminist and postcolonial issues. Another issue is the problem of typology and figurative expression and, related to this, though not exclusively, the question of subjectivity. This paper focuses on the formal aspects of typology and deliberately leaves the issue of subjectivity looming in the background. Typology is a method of figurative interpretation of the Bible which has its Christian origins in the New Testament.1 It was developed by the Church Fathers in 1 For an introduction to the history of typology and to Puritan typology, see for example: Typology and Early American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972) and in that volume particularly Thomas M. Davis’ historical overview in “The Traditions of Puritan Typology” (11- -45); Wallace E.Anderson’s introduction to “Images of Divine Things” and “Types” and Mason I. Lowance’s introduction to “Types of the Messiah,” both in Typological Writings, edited by Wallace E. Anderson, Mason I. Lowance, Jr., David H. Watters, Works of Jonathan Edwards, volume 11 (WJE 11), (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); and Mason I. Lowance, The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 170 various versions and used extensively in medieval theology and also by the Protestant Reformers. Still around today, typology is based on the idea that the Old Testament prefigures and foreshadows the New Testament: Moses’ leading Israel out of Egyptian bondage, for example, was a prefiguration type of the church’s redemption by Christ, the antitype. This is more than a mere parallel or similarity; the antitype is believed to actually fulfill and complete what is only foreshadowed in the type. For example the sacrifices which were part of Jewish religion in Old Testament times prefigured the death of Christ on the cross; once Christ’s sacrifice is finished, the other sacrifices are no longer necessary for Christians because they were completed in the sacrifice of Christ. In contrast to allegorical interpretations of Scripture, typology insists that the type and antitype are real, historical events, institutions or people. The typological tradition, however, existed in close connection to various other methods of figurative exegesis and in many cases became subordinated to allegorical interpretations. Its historical nature was emphasized again by the Protestant Reformers, and the Puritans continued to uphold particularly Calvin’s emphasis on the historicity of the type to secure a distinction between type and allegory. Besides typology in the strictest sense as the correspondences between the Old and the New Testaments, typological principles were also extended to postbiblical church and eschatology (hence the tendency of Puritans in New England to see themselves as the “New Israel”). These varieties of the typological tradition can be found also in Jonathan Edwards’ writings. Edwards however makes another important step: he extends the idea of typology to nature as well as secular history and institutions. Finding parallels between spiritual things and things of this world was of course quite common among believers. What is different in Edwards’ case is his conviction that the correspondences between the material and the spiritual world are real, God-established and ontological: the various parts of the lower material world are, objectively, in their very constitution, images or shadows of the spiritual world. On the one hand, Edwards’ natural typology develops from popular allegorizing or spiritualizing of nature (for example John Flavel’s Husbandry Spiritualized: Or, the Heavenly Use of Earthly Things or Cotton Mather’s Agricola. Or, the Religious Husbandman). It is also indebted to the medieval and Renaissance habit of thinking in analogies and correspondences and to contemporary Neoplatonism. On the other hand it can be interpreted as a step in the development toward Romanticism and Transcendentalism, as divine revelation can now be found in nature and the mind is given a central role in discovering the transcendental meanings of nature. Theologically of course Edwards denies that the mind would invent the spiritual meaning of nature; he argues that the spiritual correspondences between the natural and the spiritual world were actually established by God. The concept of harmony of universe, a web of divinely instituted relations between beings and events is fundamental for his thought. It is a telling fact however that Edwards realizes the dangers necessarily attending this theological move. He anticipates being accused of “inventing” rather than “discovering,” in other words to be accused that his natural types are nothing but imagined, subjective interpretations which cannot be epistemologically reliable. His defensive stance suggest that Edwards believed his natural typology to be an important new insight which would change the way people understood God’s revelation: England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1980). For a classical introduction to typology and a general history, see: Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, translated by Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11-76.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 180 that instead of “a typological tradition” there rather are versions of tradition, and versions might always already be subversions, the difference between them being but a matter of convention. Bibliography Primary Sources All references to the works of Jonathan Edwards are from the Works of Jonathan Edwards (WJE), vols. 1-26 (Yale University Press, 1957-2008). Note: Quotations from the WJE are copied directly without any changes, including editors’ brackets and other interventions. Only three dots ( . . . ) indicate my own ellipsis. Edwards, Jonathan. Scientific and Philosophical Writings. Edited by Wallace E. Anderson. Volume 6, WJE. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. ---.EthicalWritings.EditedbyPaulRamsey.Volume8,WJE.NewHaven:YaleUniversity Press, 1989. - - -. Sermons and Discourses 1720-1723. Edited by Wilson H. Kimnach. Volume 10, WJE. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. - - -. Typological Writings. Edited by Wallace E. Anderson, Mason I. Lowance, Jr., David H. Watters. Volume 11, WJE. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. - - -. The “Miscellanies,” (Entry Nos. a-z, aa-zz, 1-500). Edited by Thomas A. Schafer. Volume 13, WJE. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. - - -. Letters and Personal Writings. Edited by George S. Claghorn. Volume 16, WJE. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. - - -. Catalogues of Books. Edited by Peter J. Thuesen. Volume 26, WJE. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Secondary Sources Anderson, Wallace E. Editor’s Introduction to “Images of Divine Things” and “Types.” In Typological Writings, WJE, vol. 11, 3-33. Auerbach, Erich. “Figura.” In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, translated by Ralph Manheim, foreword by Paolo Valesio, 11-76. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Baldick, Chris. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 3rd edition. London, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. Typology and Early American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972. Daly, Peter M. Literature in the Light of the Emblem: Structural Parallels between the Emblem and Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Fabiny, Tibor. “Edwards and Biblical Typology.” In Understanding Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to America’s Theologian, edited by Gerald R. McDermott, 91-108. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Kimnach, Wilson H. Editor’s Introduction to Sermons and Discourses 1720-1723, WJE, vol. 10, 2-258. Leader, Jennifer L. “‘In Love with the Image’: Transitive Being and Typological Desire in Jonathan Edwards.” Early American Literature 41, no. 2 (2006): 153-181. Accessed July 2, 2010. Project MUSE. doi: 10.1353/eal.2006.0021. Lowance, Mason. Editor’s Introduction to “Types of the Messiah.” In Typological Writings, WJE, vol. 11, 157-186.

Anna Světlíková 181 - - -. The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1980. Man, Paul de. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, introduction by Wlad Godzich, 187-228. 2nd edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Miller, Perry. Introduction to Images or Shadows of Divine Things, edited by Perry Miller, 1-41. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948. Piggin, Stuart and Dianne Cook. “Keeping Alive the Heart in the Head: The Significance of ‘Eternal Language’ in the Aesthetics of Jonathan Edwards and S. T. Coleridge.” Literature & Theology 18, no. 4 (2004): 383-414. Quarles, Francis. Emblems, divine and moral, together with Hieroglyphicks of the life of man. English Emblem Books Project at Pennsylvania State University. Accessed July 2, 2010. http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/home.htm. Thuesen, Peter J. Editor’s Introduction to Catalogues of Books, WJE, vol. 26, 1-87. Wainwright, William J. “Jonathan Edwards and the Language of God.” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48 (1980): 519-530. Anna Světlíková is a PhD candidate at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University in Prague. Her doctoral research focuses on literary issues of the writings of Jonathan Edwards. She spent a year researching at the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University as a Fulbright student. She has presented papers on Edwards at several academic events in Europe and in the United States.

182 Alternative Histories: Philip Roth and The Plot Against America Paul Titchmarsh Abstract This paper deals with Philip Roth’s continual idea of “what if…” with a concentration on his novel The Plot Against America. Roth has always called himself a suppositional writer, though Roth, (who is Roth?) is a continual presence in his work (Zuckerman and Kepesh, for example, in other writerly personae). Nevertheless, this work makes us question various ideas about twentieth-century American history, not only in terms of the personal, but also in terms of ideas about nationality. This is a novel that is both comic and tragic and which makes us think about our position in the contemporary world of Central and East Europe. More importantly, it makes us think about what is happening in contemporary America. It also questions ideas about Roth as author. Keywords American identity, American nationalism, Jewishness, anti-Semitism, dystopia, Philip Roth, The Plot Against America The plot in The Plot Against America (2004) is twofold, because it is first and foremost a plot against a specific group of Americans, but secondly it is also what one particular administration perceives as a home grown plot, what Charles Lindbergh unjustifiably believed was a conspiracy, against “Aryan” values. The plot is not against either an imperial, aggressively expansionistAmerica or anAmerica depicted as the land of liberty, but it is against America as an increasingly shaken, if mythical, utopia of tolerance, as in Emma Lazarus’s words on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” where those “huddled masses” went into factories and sweat shops. The perspective is that of a Jewish child and his family, the historical Roths transplanted into a parallel time, where Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, thereby denying Roosevelt a third term in office, and shaking the foundations of American political life. To a degree, the novel can be taken as going into a world like that of the 1960s television series, The Twilight Zone, where life could be lived in parallel time zones. The last two words in the Lazarus quotation are apposite, because the words “breathe free” take a severe beating in the novel, not least because they signify certain changes that affect the structure of the environment in which the characters live. Yet whilst the fictitious Lindbergh administration hovers ominously in the background, the real story in the novel centres on the totally assimilated, even secularised, and Americanised Roth family itself, the descendants of immigrants who identify completely with the country they inhabit and which the author presents to us as a genuinely American story, one in which the Roths will have to undergo familial conflict and external perils and will eventually come through the two years of the novel’s time sequence battered and bruised, but survivors. Philip and his family know they are Jews, and that this threatens to set them apart. Earlier, before presidential changes, the father, Herman, rejects a promotion that would require moving to a gentile neighbourhood, an event that will have echoic effects later in the narrative, both on a personal level and in terms of Herman’s co-workers at the Newark Metropolitan Life Insurance office (the idea of insurance works as a cruel joke, because insurance, or protection, is undermined,

Paul Titchmarsh 183 even though everybody identifies themselves as Americans, and they are going to be plunged into insecurity). Driving out to see the area, to a place that can be ironically thought of as a false new found land, Philip’s mother is anxious and doubtful, but Herman has done “everything he could to keep our spirits up” and gives “a lesson in elementary economics” regarding “the benefits of paying a mortgage over that of rent,” an exercise in American finance that ends abruptly at a red light next to “a parklike drinking establishment”: “Sons of bitches!” my father said. “Fascist bastards!” and then the lights changed and we drove on in silence to look at the office building where he was about to get his chance to earn more than fifty dollars a week. It was my brother who, when we went to bed that night, explained why my father had lost control and cursed aloud in front of his children: the homey acre of open-air merriment smack in the middle of town was called a beer-garden, the beer-garden had something to do with the German-American Bund, the German- American Bund had something to do with Hitler, and Hitler, as I hadn’t been told, had everything to do with persecuting Jews.1 This Saturday outing, on the Sabbath, it should be noted and pointing directly to the secular nature of this particular family, will have future consequences and will not only affect the Roths, but Herman’s co-employees, who will be sent away from their natural environments and into the “wilderness” of the South-west, a geographical location that has been such a fascination for generations of many East coast urban writers, one that will be given a twist here in terms of ethnicity and race. Philip, his brother, Sandy, and his parents, “steeped in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson,” revels in the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, and finds the bearded, yarmulke-wearing stranger, who sometimes turns up and goes door-to-door collecting donations to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, bewildering. “We’d already had a homeland for three generations [...] Our homeland was America.”2 The question that hovers over the text is an historical one, “What is an American?” but given a particularly twentieth-century slant. As Herman Roth says, when his wife comes to feel that they are aliens in the land of their birth, “They think we only think we’re Americans. It is not up for discussion, Bess.”3 To the Roths, America is the set of constitutional and governmental checks and balances that allows them to live unmolested in Jewish neighbourhoods. What they share with their neighbours is not a particularly Jewish culture but simply a relief from the prejudice that, anywhere else, made them feel like outsiders. “It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbours for me far more than religion,” Roth writes4 and there is a powerful sense that the neighbourhood and family depictions here are largely autobiographical. “Nobody in the neighbourhood had a beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap either outside or in the houses.”5 1 Roth, Philip, The Plot Against America. (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 10. 2 Roth, The Plot, 3. 3 Roth, The Plot, 256. 4 Roth, The Plot, 3. 5 Roth, The Plot, 3.

Paul Titchmarsh 193 businessmen in The Plot Against America are full of lion-like roaring and jokes and gestures, portraying a dynamism that the modest, hard-working Herman is portrayed as lacking and which might make him appear to be dull, yet Roth’s argument here is that ordinary and superficially unprepossessing people are the truly solid majority. The nightmare of the Lindbergh presidency becomes, for Roth the novelist, a way of applying a brutal pressure to his father and mother, an experiment that reveals, in extremis, their true worth. At the moment of greatest crisis, each of them is called upon to act, and each shows the clarity of genuine courage, mobilized by their most deeply held ideals. To insist on a place in this country no matter what the “nature of things” might be, is, for Herman Roth, and eventually for his son Philip, to be American. Bibliography Dickstein, Morris. Leopards in the Dark; The Transformation of American Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Roth, Philip, The Plot Against America. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004. - - -. The Facts. London, Jonathan Cape, 1989. - - -. Essay: The Story Behind ‘The Plot Against America.’ The New York Times (accessed 14 April, 2010), http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res Wood, Michael, “Just Folks,” review of The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth, The London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/michael-wood/just-folks Paul Titchmarsh teaches English and American Literature at the University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary. Prior to Hungary, he taught literature at universities in England and Germany. He studied History at the University of Wales, where he completed his MA at University College, Cardiff (1976), and English and American Literature at King’s College, University of London (MA, 1987; PhD, 1991).

194 Christopher Isherwood: A Major Model for the Margin? Roman Trušník Abstract The present article explores the fact that Christopher Isherwood, an author who was an American citizen for almost half of his life and who wrote his masterpiece, A Single Man (1964), as an American writer, is excluded from mainstream histories of American literature. The article reviews primarily sources on American gay literature that establish Isherwood as one of the major formative figures of the twentieth-century gay novel. It concludes that in the age of authors coming from the margin to the center, the mainstream histories ofAmerican literature paradoxically seem to have pushed a major author to the margin of literary life. Keywords Christopher Isherwood; twentieth-century American literature; twentieth-century British literature; gay literature; homosexuality; narrative technique; thematic criticism In American literature, literatures on the margin sometimes seem to constitute a world of their own, independent of the literary mainstream. Indisputable celebrities of a minority/ethnic literature may be virtually unknown to scholars who are not experts on the literature of that particular minority, in this case, on American gay literature. One of the authors neglected by mainstream literary historians is Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986), who is not even mentioned in standard histories of American literature such as Richard Ruland’s and Malcolm Bradbury’s From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (1991) or Richard Gray’s comprehensive A History of American Literature (2004). Even Cyrus R. K. Patell, who devotes fifteen pages to gay and lesbian literature in Volume 7 of The Cambridge History of American Literature (gen. ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, 1999) limits his treatment of Isherwood to a single note that “[s]ome novelists […] take up the project embodied by Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964), which depicted the life of a middle-aged, middle class man, a life that in its very ordinariness implicitly attacked the idea that gay men were effeminate, deviant, and predatory.”1 On the other hand, Isherwood is included in all histories ofAmerican gay literature as one of the most significant twentieth-century writers. The purpose of this study is to explore how Isherwood is perceived by these authoritative sources that in one way or another constitute the canon of American gay writing. Considering the fact that minority authors are often praised for the political significance of their work rather than their literary skill, I will explore whether these formative sources pay more attention to the narrative technique, or to other criteria, such as the themes or the attitude toward the gay subject matter. The exclusion of Christopher Isherwood from the mainstream handbooks of American literature may be caused by a misapprehension of his British origin, especially when he wrote some of his most significant works as an American citizen. Isherwood was born in Cheshire, England, in 1904 and received his education at the University of Cambridge, though he never graduated. Along with the poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, 1 Cyrus R. K. Patell, “Emergent Literatures,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7:665.

Roman Trušník 195 he formed what is sometimes known as the “Auden Circle” or the “Auden Gang.”2 All of Isherwood’s fiction is largely autobiographical. In the 1920s he spent several years in Berlin, and this experience became the basis for his novels Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), later collectively published as The Berlin Stories (1945). Some motifs from The Berlin Stories also became the basis of the musical Cabaret, best known as the 1972 movie directed by Bob Fosse, with Liza Minnelli, Michael York and Joel Grey. Isherwood came to the United States in 1939 and became a United States citizen in 1946. His later works were distinctly American, and they also included an increasing number of gay themes in novels such as The World in the Evening (1954), Down There on a Visit (1962), up to his masterpiece A Single Man (1964). At the end of his writing career, he returned to the genre of (auto)biographies and published titles such as Kathleen and Frank (1971), a biography of his parents, and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a reevaluation of his earlier autobiographical writing. Isherwood’s most significant novel, A Single Man (1964), was a major achievement in its time. It portrays a single day in the life of George, an Englishman in his fifties living in the United States. George recently lost his lover Jim in a car-crash, yet he is unwilling to admit that before his neighbors, preferring to tell them that Jim is with his family. The novel starts with a view of George’s sleeping body coming alive and becoming George, George’s morning routine, the seminar at the university where he teaches, his workout, his visit to a female friend dying of cancer, and an evening spent with another friend, a British woman contemplating her return to Europe. His day finishes in a bar where he meets a student of his, Kenny, with whom, after some talk, he goes skinny-dipping in the ocean, is brought by him home, and tucked in bed. Then, at the end of the novel, George falls asleep – and perhaps dies. Isherwood may be given scant attention by historians of American literature, yet it is significant to note that this kind of neglect cannot be observed in histories of British literature. In his introduction in The Short Oxford History of English Literature (3rd ed., 2004) Andrew Sanders even discusses the reasons for Isherwood’s inclusion: Both Auden and Isherwood, who became citizens of the United States in the 1940s, have been included simply because it seems impossible to separate their most distinctive work from the British context in which it was written. The situations of Conrad, Eliot, James, Auden, and Isherwood are in certain ways exemplary of what has happened to English literature in the twentieth century. It is both English and it is not. It is both British and it is not.3 Yet (or perhaps, for this reason), Sanders focuses on Isherwood’s early, pre- American period: “His collaborative experiments with drama apart, Isherwood is likely to be remembered for his two most individual works of fiction, Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin (1939).”4 This appraisal would certainly face strong opposition from the critics of American gay literature who almost universally agree that Isherwood is likely to be remembered primarily for his novel A Single Man (1964), a work Sanders fails to mention altogether. 2 See Andrew Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 594. 3 Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, 15. 4 Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, 566.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 202 George is both unique (the ‘single’ man of the novel’s title) and archetypal,”37 which he notices especially in the beginning of the novel. Brookes understands the “struggle between identity and difference […] is central to the novel,”38 which he further explores by analyzing George’s non-existent connection with the gay community as well as his edantic ideas. To sum up, the amount of space devoted to Isherwood in histories of British literature, all types of sources on American gay literature as well as other critical and theoretical sources makes the exclusion of Christopher Isherwood from mainstream histories of American literature rather perplexing. As various historians and critics of gay literature balance their discussion of the themes important in the gay community with their appreciation of Isherwood’s narrative techniques, Isherwood’s inclusion in the canon should not be accused of being politically motivated: the sources consulted in this article pay due attention to Isherwood’s literary skills, both in the role of the narrator in his early fiction and the innovative narrative technique in his later fiction, namely A Single Man. In the age of authors moving from the margin to the center, the mainstream histories of American literature seem paradoxically to have pushed a major author to the margin of literary life. However, the reasons for Isherwood’s literary ostracism remain unresolved and beg for future research. Acknowledgement The research for this paper was supported by GA ČR, Project 405/09/P357 “Faces of American Gay Novel After 1945.” Bibliography Bergman, David. The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. 1994. New York: Riverhead, 1995. Brookes, Les. Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall: Ideology, Conflict, and Aesthetics. New York: Routledge, 2009. Carter, Ronald, and John McRae. The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland. London: Routledge, 1997. Drake, Robert. The Gay Canon: Great Books Every Gay Man Should Read. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Fludernik, Monika. An Introduction to Narratology. London: Routledge, 2009. ---. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. 1996. London: Routledge, 2005. Gray, Richard. A History of American Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Hogan, Steve, and Lee Hudson. “Isherwood, Christopher (1904–1986).” In Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia, 302–3. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964. Patell, Cyrus R. K. “Emergent Literatures.” In The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 7, Prose Writing, 1940–1990, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, 539–716. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Ruland, Richard, and Malcolm Bradbury. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. New York: Viking, 1991. 37 Brookes, Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall, 45. 38 Brookes, Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall, 59.

Roman Trušník 203 Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” In Against Interpretation, 275–92. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Summers, Claude J. “Christopher Isherwood.” In The Gay & Lesbian Literary Companion, edited by Sharon Malinowski and Christa Brelin, 285–91. Detroit: Visible Ink, 1995. ---. Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall; Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition. New York: Continuum, 1990. ---. “Isherwood, Christopher (1904–1986).” In The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and their Works, From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Claude J. Summers, 388–91. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. ---. “ISHERWOOD, Christopher (William Bradshaw).” In Gay & Lesbian Literature, edited by Sharon Malinowski, 195–98. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. Woodhouse, Reed. Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945–1995. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Woods, Gregory. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1998. Roman Trušník isAssistant Professor in the Department of English andAmerican Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Czech Republic. His research focuses on American gay fiction after 1945. He co-edited Cult Fiction & Cult Film: Multiple Perspectives (2008; with Marcel Arbeit) and a volume of conference proceedings, Theories in Practice (2010; with Katarína Nemčoková). He is the managing editor of the Moravian Journal of Literature and Film and the current treasurer of the Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies.

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Student Section

207 “Migrant Mother”: the Depression Era Madonna Ivana Marvánová Abstract In the 1930s, American photography was enriched by the works of a group of documentary photographers in which Dorothea Lange seemed to play quite a significant role. “Migrant Mother,” Lange’s portrait of a woman holding a baby and surrounded by two of her other children, immediately exceeded boundaries of an ordinary photograph and became more than an icon of a forlorn decade. The photograph’s unusual composition, reflecting Lange’s ability to capture feelings of sorrow and hunger together with hope, confidence, and solidarity, forced many art critics to analyze the photograph and discuss its hidden meanings. One such view of the image compares it to a portrayal of Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus. This article is an attempt to explain this biblical interpretation, as well as to describe the genesis of one of the best known photographs of the twentieth century. Keywords American documentary photography, Depression era, Dorothea Lange, “Migrant Mother”, icon The Story Behind the Picture Dorothea Lange’s photograph “Migrant Mother” remains a symbol of the Depression era and the Dust Bowl tragedy in the minds of many Americans. Moreover, the fact that the picture was taken by chance, or more accurately, by Lange’s “instinct,”1 as she once recalled in an interview, enhances the picture’s value and makes the story of its creation more attractive. In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the New Deal, which included dozens of recovery organizations and programs for stabilizing the harsh economic and social situation in the United States. Three years after this, Lange was employed as a documentary photographer in the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), one of the relief programs sponsored by the government. The main task of the FSA photographers “was to photograph conditions of rural and urban poverty that would serve to educate the people about the most pressing of the nation’s problems.”2 Nevertheless, the FSA was considered to be controversial, and many critics saw these photographs as a piece of propaganda. Rebecca Maksel describes how in March 1936 Lange, who had been working for the FSA for nearly six weeks, was on her way back home to Berkley. Next to a California motorway, she glimpsed an area that was arrow signposted as a “Pea-Pickers Camp.”3 Duane Damon adds: “[…] What could one more group of exhausted, hungry workers add to the pictures she already had? Besides, there was home only seven hours away. 1 Jacqueline Ellis, Silent Witnesses : Representations of Working-Class Women in the United States (Bowling Green : Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1998), 41. 2 William H Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, The West of Imagination (New York : Norton, 1986), 392-393. 3 Rebecca Maksel, “Migrant Madonna,” Smithsonian (March 2002), 21.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 208 Lange drove on.”4 With a vision of her home, family and final rest, she continued driving on for about twenty miles before she decided to stop her car, return to the camp, and visit it. Damon describes the image Lange saw when she entered the camp: Returning to the sign, Lange found the all-too-familiar layout of a migrant camp - rows of crude tents and flimsy shacks in a soggy bed of mud, no electricity, no running water. Among the tired, unkempt residents, a thin woman sat in a lean-to of patched canvas. Scattered around the tent were chairs, a makeshift table, and three unwashed children.5 When Lange was later asked what forced her to return to the camp and how she met the migrant woman, she described it this way: I was following instinct, not reason, I drove into that soggy camp and parked my car like a homing pigeon. I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence to her, or my camera, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty- two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding field and birds that the children had killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. Here she sat in a lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my picture might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.6 Immediately after leaving the pea-pickers camp, Lange developed the photographs from Nipomo and sent them to the San Francisco News as well as to the Washington office of the FSA. Vicki Goldberg writes about the first publication of the photograph that appeared in the News on 10th March 1936. The pictures were added to an article which said: “Ragged, ill, emaciated by hunger, 2,500 men, women and children are rescued after weeks of suffering by the chance visit of a Government photographer.”7 According to Milton Meltzer, the editorial that followed this sentence: “[…] attacked both the counties and the state for being so shortsighted and inhumane as not to offer the migrants help.”8 Since the published photographs and articles did not mention the portrayed woman’s name or her life story, Florence Owens Thompson stayed unknown until the late 1970s when she decided to tell her story to the local Modesto Bee newspaper. The web page www.famouspictures.org contains excerpts from Thompson’s interview. She 4 Duane Damon, Headin’ for Better Times : The Arts of the Great Depression (Minneapolis : Twenty-First Century Books, 2002), 65. 5 Damon, Headin’ for Better Times, 65-66 6 Ellis, Silent Witnesses, 41. 7 Vicki Goldberg, Photography in Print : Writings from 1816 to the Present (New York : Simon & Schuster, 1981), 355. 8 Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life. (1st Syracuse University Press edition. New York : Syracuse University Press, 2000), 134.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 214 Surprisingly, a response came quite soon after the publication of “Migrant Mother” in newspapers. According to Maksel, 20,000 pounds of food was sent into the Nipomo camp within few weeks.34 But this help came too late for the migrant mother in the photo. She and her family left the camp shortly after Dorothea Lange took the iconic image, one that after seventy-four years still arouses emotions and memories. In this period photography became viewed in a different way. No more was it seen merely as art, but more often as a tool for documentation, for informing the general public and swaying public opinion. Undeniably, Lange had the talent to combine both, art and a message. Owing in part to her iconic pictures of the Dust Bowl migrants, including “Migrant Mother,” the farmers’ hardship was given public attention and redress in the form of governmental relief. In viewing the images, one thing that cannot be denied is Dorothea Lange’s sympathy with and understanding of people in need. She has inspired these feelings in other people through her photographs. Bibliography Bennett, Lennie. “Depression’s ‘Migrant Mother’ Remains a Powerful Image.” St. Petersburg Times, May 11, 2008. Accessed February 20, 2010. http://www.tampabay.com/ features/visualarts/article493338.ece. Damon, Duane. Headin’ for Better Times: The Arts of the Great Depression. Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books, 2002. Ellis, Jacqueline. Silent Witnesses: Representations of Working-Class Women in the United States. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press,1998. Goetzmann, William H. and William N. Goetzmann, The West of Imagination. New York : Norton, 1986. Goldberg, Vicki. Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981. Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. History of Photography. 2005. Accessed July 10, 2009. . Jones, Carolyn. “Daughter of ‘Migrant Mother’ Proud of Story: Iconic Image: Kids of ‘Migrant Mother’ Were Proud of Her.” San Francisco Gate, August 23, 2009. Accessed January 10, 2010. http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-08-23/news/17178626_ 1_images-farm-children. Koetzle, Hans-Michael. Slavné fotografie: historie skrytá za obrazy. Praha: Slovart, 2003. Translated by Dagmar Steidlová. Lucas, Dean. “Depression Mother.” Famous Pictures: The Magazine, 2009.Accessed February 19, 2010. http://www.famouspictures.org/mag/index.php?title=Depression_Mother. Maksel, Rebecca. “Migrant Madonna.: Smithsonian (March 2002): 21-22. Meltzer, Milton. Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life. 1st Syracuse University Press edition. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Smith, John R. “Making the Cut: Documentary Work in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath. Literature/Film Quarterly. 35, no. 4 (2007): 329. Stones, Michael. “The Other Migrant Mother.” Open Photography Forum (2006, last updated: 23 July 2009). Accessed July 10, 2009. http://www.openphotographyforums.com/ art_MICHAEL_STONES_001.php. 34 Maksel, “Migrant Madonna,” 22.

Ivana Marvánová 215 Zwirn, Susan Goetz. “Men and Women at Work: The Portrayal of American Workers by Three Artists of the 1930s and 1940s.” Art Education 2 (March 2004). Accessed February 6, 2010. http://www.jstor.org/pss/3194112. Ivana Marvánová has recently graduated with a Master degree in English Language Education at the University of Pardubice. She has worked as a lecturer of English in the language school House of English, and in the future she is planning to study Art History. Her main interests are art, American cultural studies, literature, and history.

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219 “What is the Citie, but the People? True, the People are the Citie.” Coriolanus, Act III., Sc. I. The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night: The image of the city in the works of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan by Peter Chalupský (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2009. 133 pp. ISBN 978-3-639-14446-8) The central theme of Peter Chalupský’s work is the literary representation of the city and urban experience in late 20th century British prose fiction. The text is structured as a combination of diachronic and synchronic approaches. The first section entitled “The City as the Writer’s Object of Interest” establishes the major patterns of imagining urban space in late Victorian, modernist and post-war British literature. It contains brisk yet logically structured evidence that the city, as one of the major topoi of 20th century Western writing, has been embraced in a tone ranging from celebratory to gloomy, even dystopian. The author shows that the almost mesmerizing potential of the city in modern times springs largely from its commonly imagined fragmentary, heterogeneous, pluralist and anxious nature echoing broader yet analogous concepts of the modern human condition. This section thus fittingly functions as a prelude to the main parts of the book in which Chalupský advances his arguments in reading Martin Amis’s (ch. 2, pp. 27-79) and Ian McEwan’s (ch. 3, pp. 80-124) novels from the last two decades of the 20th century. Amis and McEwan are approached as postmodern novelists who did not only explore the urban milieu in a multitude of ways rooted in previous periods, but also as writers whose use of the city gradually changed. The book thus traces the curves indicative of their specific transformations. Amis is presented as tending to deploy the city imagery for constructing “satirical probes into the consciousness and conscience of people in the late twentieth century,” (126) and for addressing the issues of identity, otherness (Other People: A Mystery Story, 1981) and modern commercial culture (Money: A Suicide Note, 1984). Moreover, Chalupský shows how this range was expanded in later novels by voicing broader issues of uniformity, the cyclical nature of everyday existence and “hunts” for pseudo-reality - simulacra substituting for the “real” (London Fields, 1989). While the text repeatedly claims that Amis’s novels “exploit” urban space and its inhabitants for giving increasingly alarming expression to hostile, dystopian and even apocalyptic visions, an important aspect of Chalupský’s attentive reading is the identification, in Amis’s work, of a glimmer of hope. The title of the following chapter “Ian McEwan - From the Haunted to the Moral” already suggests that McEwan’s engagement with the city is equally dynamic, yet qualitatively different from that of Amis. Chalupský argues that McEwan’s early novels construct the (sub)urban environment as a nightmarish wasteland and metaphorical evocation of the contemporary degeneration of human relationships through oppression, loneliness, isolation, cruelty and fear (The Cement Garden, 1978; The Comfort of Strangers, 1981). In later prose (e.g. Amsterdam, 1998) McEwan does not only “universalize” his use of the urban space, but he also gestures towards optimism by rendering the city as a place where moral choices and what Chalupský calls the “ever-present struggle of human conscience with the temptations and snares of life, altruism and selfishness” (104) are among the prime remedies that may lead to the reinstating of a functional society. Thus, from a comparative point of view, this chapter soundly illustrates that while McEwan has always explored his characters’ inner workings more than Amis

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 220 (tending towards types and caricatures – e.g. John Self in Money), what gradually gained momentum in his later novels was the psychological dimension and the complexity of character construction. On the whole, Chalupský’s book is ambitious in trying to grapple with a complex issue, yet it benefits immensely from its narrow and clearly defined scope. The author performs a sequence of detailed, revealing and convincing readings of two contemporary novelists from a perspective that is quite refreshing when viewed in the context of other existing criticism of these writers. Going through the book, one is constantly reminded of the fact that to employ the city in imaginative literature, be it as a setting, theme or symbol, is not a mere reiteration of an established pattern. Chalupský’s analyses show that to engage with the urban environment is to deal with a “text” offering itself to endless interpretations, rereadings and rewritings. Repeatedly, he draws attention to the fact that Amis and McEwan, as well as their fictional characters (e.g. Clive in Amsterdam), interpret the city in different and evolving ways. It is with this aspect of critical awareness that Chalupský approaches both novelists as authors of postmodern urban fiction, forming only two out of numerous other threads that have been and undoubtedly will continue to be woven together in the endless and vibrant tapestry of the urban space. In the course of the 20th century the poetics of place as a form of thematic criticism has taken numerous forms ranging from archetypal, phenomenological to environmental and ecocritical. Chalupský, too, draws some attention to the dialectic opposition of the city and the country explored in most of the above-mentioned approaches. Yet, generally, he reads literary representations of the urban space through the prism of sociology and postmodern theories of art. This enables him to explore the relationship between an individual and environment seen as a process of mutual interaction, influence, conditioning and analogy. The author shows that the city can function as a vehicle for exploring the major aspects of postmodern thought expressed for example in terms of irony, fragmentation, isolation, plurality, commerce, politics and tourism. Chalupský seems a trustworthy guide through the complex terrain of his thesis. Along the way the reader meets numerous critics and theoretical concepts from literary, cultural and sociological backgrounds. However, it is somewhat unfortunate that in most cases these are only briefly mentioned and their propositional potential is not further applied to the author’s own analysis (perhaps with the exception of Zygmund Bauman’s identity patterns of a postmodern man). Raymond Williams and his canonical The City and the Country may be taken as an example. On the one hand, Chalupský views the work as representing “a crucial influence which has helped to shape many contemporary writers’ fictional treatment of the city;” (21) on the other hand, Williams’ arguments and influence are not really explored to the fullest. A similar claim can be made about Roland Barthes (37-38) and Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra (49), mentioned only through a secondary source (Linda Hutcheon’s Poetics of Postmodernism). A more detailed examination of the arguments of these commentators would have undoubtedly enriched the tone of Chalupský’s already enticing argumentation. Any book of literary criticism fulfils its mission only when it can be used for further exploration of the same or related area. In this respect, it is regrettable that the publisher does not attach to Chalupský’s well-researched text at least a name index, which would enhance its usability. Also, the text was not carefully edited in terms of other formal details (e.g. typos and a missing endnote on page 130).

Ladislav Vít 221 The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night does not only announce a fresh and pleasant dawn in Amis and McEwan criticism, but, due to its socio-literary approach, it also offers valuable conclusions to researchers in other fields. Moreover, Chalupský’s receptive reading of the dynamic urban space and its literary representation shows its constant and inevitable Janus-faced nature: the city may be abhorred, criticised or juxtaposed with the idyll of the countryside, yet it remains one of the most unceasingly fascinating and inspirational literary topoi known in Western imagination. by Ladislav Vít

223 The Department of Translation Studies & The Department of English and American Studies Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia would like to invite you to the conference: Modern Fantasy Fiction in Interpretation and Translation Nitra, 15 March 2011 Fantasy fiction is one the most popular genres of contemporary literature for children and young adults. Due to its enormous popularity with the readers of all age groups, it represents a cross-over genre par excellence. The conference will focus on various aspects of contemporary fantasy literature within the fields of literary and translation studies. Contributions are invited for two main sections -- literature and translation (for which papers may also be presented in Slovak). Papers may focus on individual writers, fictional texts or specific issues and problems related to the process of translation. Interpretative, analytical and comparative studies of fantasy fiction are also warmly welcomed. Application deadline: 13 December 2010 Contact: PhDr. Maria Kissova, PhD Department of English and American Studies mkissova@ukf.sk Conference organizers: PhDr. Michal Vančo, PhD Prof. PhDr. Edita Gromová, CSc Doc. PhDr. Anton Pokrivčák, PhD PhDr. Petra Pappová, PhD Selected papers delivered at the conference will be published in the journal Ars Aeterna shortly after the event itself. A conference fee of 30 EURO payable upon arrival will cover refreshments and publication costs of the journal. Send completed proposals by 13 December 2010 to: mkissova@ukf.sk

224 From the Beginning Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Letters, Catholic University in Ružomberok 2000-2010 On this, the tenth anniversary of the Catholic University in Ružomberok we in the Department of English Language and Literature can reflect positively and with pride on our development from a small group of committed individuals working in one aged building to a much larger but no less committed group working in a complex of several newly refurbished structures. Or perhaps we should say groups of people, for the originally small student body has grown as well. A number of individuals played key roles in this development. The first to plant the seed was doc. PhDr. Ján Puci, M.A., CSc. Under his stewardship the seed took root and began to sprout; with the addition of Professor Kathleen Dubs it continued to grow in strength; with further additions in subsequent years of highly qualified younger faculty members as well as senior colleagues, under the leadership of Dr. Aurélia Plávková, it truly began to blossom. We are now a committed, active and fruitful department under the leadership of Dr. Janka Kaščáková. The physical changes have been remarkable as well. The original building was constructed as a hostel for workers, and housed every department and administrative office of the University, including residences. It now houses the Faculty of Education. The Faculty of Arts and Letters has moved across the courtyard into a newly refurbished building, one complete with the latest technologies for teaching and conferences, and is WIFI capable. We have not only grown, but diversified and, like other academic departments participating in the European Union’s Bologna Protocol, have revised our program to meet those standards. The department offers the traditional BA and MA degrees in literature and linguistics, as well as a specialized BA program in Business for Commercial Purposes. The specialties of the teaching staff range from Old and Middle English to contemporary British, American and Canadian literature; visual culture and film studies, critical theory, gender studies and feminism; and from the history of the English language and historical linguistics to phonology, syntax and theoretical linguistics. All these areas are represented in the scholarly activities of the faculty, a small portion of which are included in this volume. The activities of members of the faculty are mirrored by our students. While several members of our faculty have been awarded scholarships and grants to study and conduct research abroad in the UK and America, our students have also been active in the mobility programs of the EU, especially Erasmus. A number of our BA students are furthering their education and have entered or completed MA programs with us or at other universities, including a few in the United States and the United Kingdom. Two of our BA students who received their MA degrees in Scotland are now continuing their progress for PhD degrees there as scholarship students. Further, we have been fortunate in hosting a number of visiting professors, mainly through the Fulbright Program. These scholars have enriched us as well as our students. We also have welcomed a number of international students, both through the Erasmus program and other student exchange programs with universities in the United States. Our resident faculty is also diverse, including colleagues from abroad, giving us a truly international dimension.

American & British Studies Annual, Volume 3, 2010 225 One highlight of the history of the department is undoubtedly our first international conference organized in June 2009, with theme of Ambiguity. Plenary speakers come from the UK, America, the Czech Republic, and Hungary; in turn seven countries were represented by academics presenting papers. The three day conference was so successful that it not only resulted in an eBook of proceedings, but a published volume of selected essays. Encouraged by the comments of the participants, we are now in the planning stages for our second event, which will take place in August 2011 with the theme of Presence and Absence. We hope that this brief glimpse of our history and prospects for the future will show why we have confidence in the department’s continued success in educating a new generation of students who will carry on a tradition of academic excellence. Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Arts and Letters, Catholic University in Ruzomberok Hrabovská cesta 1 034 01 Ružomberok Slovakia

226 Versions and Subversions of Tradition in Literature and Cultural Studies Pardubice, 24-25 June 2010 During two sunny days in late June 2010, the Department of English and American Studies of the University of Pardubice hosted the 10th anniversary session of what has become a truly international cultural studies conference. Right in line with the theme of this year’s event, Versions and Subversions of Tradition in Literature and Cultural Studies, traditions of previous conferences here were both celebrated and broken in several ways. For example this year the conference venue was Pardubice Castle, constructed in the late Gothic style in the latter half on the 16th century. The 2010 event attracted scholars from Hungary, Montenegro, Poland, Slovakia and the United States of America along with academics from across the Czech Republic. The day began with welcoming addresses from our department’s own Šárka Ježková representing the office of the Dean of the Philosophical Faculty as well as from John Vance, a Counselor for Public Affairs of the United States Embassy. As was the case at the inaugural Cultural Studies Conference ten years ago, it was an honor to have Professor Josef Jařab of Palacký University in Olomouc initiate the proceedings. Professor Jařab’s lecture was entitled “Poetry of African-American Women in the Course of Time and Events,” and focused on the poets Phyllis Wheatley and Nikki Giovanni. Professor Jařab drew intriguing parallels between the two authors’ works and lives, as well as between the historical periods they lived through and reflected. In her own lecture Professor Krystyna Stamirowska of Jagiellonian University examined reading, readers and authors with examples from George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray and Nathalie Sarraute. In the third opening address Amherst College Professor Karen Sanchéz- Eppler gave a presentation on “Castaways: The 19th Century American Child Reader and Transatlantic Flotsam” in which she discussed books for and by children, highlighting versions of Robinson Crusoe through the years. The conference then continued in two parallel sessions, the question of subverting the old into the new bringing together scholars who presented papers dealing with, among other themes, questions of mythopoeia and identity: “The Native American Version of the Pocahontas Myth,” “‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ in Postmodern Culture,” “The Vampire as a Version and Subversion of Victorian Identity,” “Percival Everett’s Subversion of the Bildungsroman genre,” “The Scenology of Landscape in The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds,” “Kill Will 1 - Shakespearean Subversion in Postmodern cinematic Liveness.” Between sessions participants were able to explore the castle and its surroundings, moving freely throughout the atmospheric rooms and spacious grounds. We hope the 10th conference provided an opportunity for stimulating exchanges of ideas in both formal and informal settings. The 2010 event examined definitions and critiques of tradition, but one tradition that will surely continue in the years to come is that of international cultural studies conferences at the University of Pardubice. We are already looking forward to next year’s meeting! Petra Smažilová, Daniel Paul Sampey

227 Guidelines for Authors: We welcome original articles devoted to a variety of issues of American and British cultural studies. Articles must be neither previously published nor under consideration for publication elsewhere. All articles will be anonymously peer-reviewed by experts in the author’s field of study. Manuscripts of 4000-7000 words should be submitted in English and generally should follow the humanities Chicago Style of citations (footnotes and bibliography). Authors are responsible for an adequate and correct language usage. Each submission should include keywords and a short abstract (100-200words) outlining its argument. Each article should also be followed by a brief biographical note about the author. All the author-identifying information will be removed prior to the reviewing process. Please submit your articles in electronic form in “*.rtf” format to annual@upce.cz. More information about the periodical can be found at: http://www.upce.cz/ff/kaa.html.

American and British Studies Annual Volume 3, 2010/ Číslo 3, 2010. Published by the University of Pardubice./ Vydává Univerzita Pardubice. Studentská 84, 532 10 Pardubice Print/ Tisk: xPrint, s. r. o., Příbram Cover design/ návrh obálky: Jan Blažíček Volume’s responsible editors/ editoři čísla: Šárka Bubíková, Daniel Sampey, Ladislav Vít ISSN: 1803-6058 ISBN: 978-80-7395-216-7