Suchergebnisse

Figurative & literal representations of the AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) epidemic are examined within the framework of literary theory & political/ideological motivations. Based on the assumption that both politics & AIDS are susceptible to analysis by the critical methodologies of literary theory, it is argued that representations of the AIDS epidemic are ultimately determined by political motivations. Although attempts have been made to distinguish between the biological/literal & the literary/fictive, it is suggested that these distinctions represent a political drive to assert authority. Citing the "Silence=Death" slogan utilized as a means of promoting awareness, discussion, & treatment of the AIDS epidemic, it is argued that any discourse on AIDS is simultaneously literal & figurative. Furthermore, interpretations of the facts & symbols of these discourse are ultimately beyond the control of the individual or group enlisting these discourses. As such, the slogan both undermines the repressive urges of the political & medical community & implicitly reinforces the discursive structures on which these symbols & acts of repression rely. It is concluded that neither the literal nor figurative provides a neutral, value-free framework for discussion of AIDS. T. Sevier

Discusses Ann Petry's short story, "Like a Winding Sheet" (1946), in the context of black feminist literary theory, exploring the possibility of developing a reading strategy that does not replicate the effacement of black women's subjectivities. Petry's story is read as a delineation of the impossible position of black female flesh in US cultural discourse; the black female subject is erased & simultaneously constructed as ungendered flesh. It is suggested that black feminist literary criticism has failed to create a vocabulary that speaks to the specificity & diversity of African American women's experiences in the US. Instead, it has worked against the available cultural categories to reduce the complexity of black female lives to the status of incoherent differences. Merely being heard will not solve the problem of black female unrepresentability; a theorization of the discursive conditions that allow complex subjects to be rendered as singular social agents is advocated. D. M. Smith

Presents a Foucauldian genealogy of the convergence of women, nation, & empire in postcolonial discourses of religion, property, & selfhood in an analysis of the controversial case of 73-year-old Shahbano, a destitute Muslim woman in India granted a small monthly allowance by the government under a colonial secular code, that compares to the figure of the female as individualist in Daniel Defoe's Roxana (1724) & a silenced rape victim in the records of the East-India Co. The trope of the female as individualist in Defoe is read in the context of the history of colonialism as a structuration that reorganizes private & public space in colonial England. The text of the trial involving the rape of a woman in the premises of the East-India Co is interpreted as another instance of the covert exercise of colonial authority through the construction of distinctions between the personal & the legal. It is suggested that these arbitrary divisions ingrained in colonialist practice were undone by Shahbano, who was able to move between the bourgeois discourse of liberal rights & the Muslim shariat (family-related religious law). Her ambivalent status between these discourses is taken to explain her ability to provoke a national crisis. D. M. Smith

Interprets the family romance of George Eliot's Adam Bede (1985 [1859]) in the context of industrial capitalism during the 18th-19th century transition & economic individualism, which spawned the middle class. Traditional readings have focused on the relation between the two principal female protagonists, Hetty Sorrel & Dinah Morris, in the boundaries of the working-class Poyer family. This focus is taken to be a consequence of the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, which tends to assign greatest explanatory weight to dynamics in the nuclear family. However, drawing on critiques of Freudianism that suggest other family types & sociocultural contexts to be as important as the nuclear family, attention is given to the character of the niece, & specifically to how this figure is located at the fringes of the traditional affective family. It is also argued that Hetty Sorrel's illegitimate pregnancy is an emblem of economic & family crisis that registers thematically & metaphorically as a crisis of ownership. Further, the text's fascination with female fat lies at the intersection of economic concerns & familial tropes in 19th-century England. It is concluded that the book is structured by a Malthusian understanding of population, production, & labor that filters its economic discourse through a misogynous mathematical understanding of sex & marriage. D. M. Smith

Considers the conflation of history with sophistication in the class & gender politics of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1972 [1818]) as an example of proto-Victorian negotiations of these issues. Austen's method is read as a process whereby refinement is manifested as particularization, in that characters who make distinctions automatically have conferred on them the distinction of being sophisticated. This is shown to be particularly true in the character Catherine's judgment of the Gothic novels she reads. Contrary to Nancy Armstrong's (1987) interpretation of this movement in the novel, which describes it as a singular shift from history to sophistication, it is argued that history is only submerged, not erased, from the novel. It is indicated by Austen's novel that, if the classification of fiction becomes more sophisticated, raising the novel's cultural stock, these changes are due to the fact that novels take historiography as their model rather than erase it from their pages. Based on this reinterpretation of the relation between history & sophistication, it is contended that the novel displays a sense that upper-middle-class sophistication might turn every upper-middle-class male body into a nauseating body. Austen's contempt for this male body is interpreted in the context of a social order that denies Austen all other forms of power except the power of style. D. M. Smith

Proposes a relationship between science & technology similar to that between poetry & narrative, & examines both poetry & science in this context. It is argued that precise language & reasoning are not necessarily the most productive means of expressing the truth; in fact, the diversity, symbolism, & simplification characterized by the poetic form of discourse can often represent ideas & opinions more clearly. The advance of printing technology in the 1880s created a surplus of printed material that needed to be organized, & this need gave rise to literary genres & a canon. Further, strong & weak literary categories are a product of historical criticism, which has tended to favor certain types of writing & writers. A similar but less documented process influenced modern science, & it is argued that both politics & aesthetics affect the sciences. Whereas great literature has been defined as a complex fulfillment & violation of expectations, science has almost universally pursued the fulfillment of expectations. It is concluded that science must aspire toward the constant shifting of goals & languages achieved by poetry, & that this multidimensional & conflicting approach will catalyze a new era of scientific understanding. 17 References. T. Sevier