Panel I: The Medieval Period to the 18th Century: Feminist Approaches

Gabriel Vicencio, “The Mysterious Made Innocuous: Using Simone de Beauvoir to Explore Gender Construction in The Squire’s Tale”

In opposition to feminist readings of Chaucer as an author who transcends the misogynist ideologies of his time, Elaine Hanson asserts that even if Chaucer sympathized with the constructed woman, he could only understand woman as Other. In contrast, by analyzing Chaucer’s The Squire’s Tale using Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas on the feminine-mysterious and feminine-Other, this paper reveals how Chaucer’s texts work against the grain of the masculinist discourse of his historical context, even if they do not explicitly offer a depiction of woman that is not Other. More specifically, I argue that by staging the male’s—here, the Squire’s—act of constructing the myth of feminine-mystery, Chaucer situates the process of gender construction in history, and thereby critiques it.

The Squire’s Tale historically contextualizes the process of gender construction by portraying the myths of the feminine-mysterious and feminine-Other outside of the romance and social conventions that legitimate them. The Squire detaches these myths from their traditional place in the then-dominant social discourse by characterizing both magic and women as mysterious, yet innocuous. What the Squire selectively retains is what Beauvoir describes as the myth of the feminine-mysterious. This myth absolves men from understanding women as transcendent beings who demand reciprocity of consideration for their role as subject. By abstracting the construct of the feminine from traditional literary discourse, Chaucer’s portrayal of the Squire highlights the fundamental artificiality of gender conventions, demythologizing them in the process.

References
Erika Claire Strandjord, “Prophetic Play as Feminist Author/ity: The Rhetoric of Vision in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judæorum”

Debates among feminist critics concerning authorship and authority (because of their close relation I will sometimes refer to these interconnected issues as author/ity) have stalled in recent years.  Concerned with the impact of post-structuralism on women authors and the question of whether these authors can use language subversively, scholars such as Andrea Abernethy Lunsford, Carla Kaplan, and Cheryl Walker have struggled to theorize a practicable way to read and write texts as feminists.  Focusing on Aemilia Lanyer’s book of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, my paper takes up this debate and proposes to move it beyond the current impasse by reexamining feminist theories of authority and authorship in light of both literary theory and studies of the rhetoric of vision—in the sense of “visionary experience.”  This interdisciplinary approach, I argue, can help illuminate the subversive dimensions of the writing of female authors like Lanyer.  Whereas Mary Hawkesworth argues against focusing on the rhetoric of vision, since it uses the symbols and language of dominant systems it cannot overthrow, I use Lanyer’s text to suggest the feminist potential of this rhetoric.  Specifically I argue that feminists, following the example of Lanyer, can use the rhetoric of vision because it turns the oppressive symbols and language upside-down through Derridean play while claiming the authority to engage in precisely this sort of deconstructive play.  

Previous criticism of Lanyer’s radical Passion narrative has mostly ignored or glossed over how she claims prophetic authority through the use of dream-visions.  Looking at three key moments in her text—the dedicatory dream-vision poem to Mary Sidney, the dream of Pilate’s wife, and Lanyer’s final note to the reader explaining how she received the book’s title in a dream—my analysis of Lanyer’s writing shows how it derives power from her simultaneous appropriation and subversion of male-dominated discourses in Christianity.  Overall I suggest that studying feminist visionaries like Lanyer can recontextualize the debate about feminist author/ity.  Rather than limitlessly extending the realm of textual play or surrendering language to patriarchy, the rhetorical strategies of authors like Lanyer claim a middle ground that allows them to imagine a space outside of patriarchy while also claiming an authoritative voice within it.

References

Jeffrey Tinley, "Building Rooms of Resistance: Demythologizing and Demystifying the Lover and Beloved in Mary Wroth’s Love Sonnets"

When writing about Lady Mary Wroth, critics have tended to adopt one of two strategies. On the one hand, some critics have made female writers the center of their investigation (Jehlen 4), analyzing Wroth’s work in relation to other women writers and her position as a woman in Jacobean England. On the other hand, critics have also attempted to appreciate her poetry strictly in relation to the poetic achievements of her male contemporaries. My paper suggests a third way by arguing for a “radical comparativism” similar to the method outlined in Myra Jehlen’s “Archimedes and The Paradox of Feminist Criticism.”  In doing so, it examines how Wroth’s poetics confronts male myths and poses a direct challenge to what Simone de Beauvoir has characterized as male “Othering”--the objectification, mythologizing, and mystification of women by men. Specifically, by re-appropriating the traditionally male-oriented love sonnet in both her prose romance Urania and her sonnet cycle Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Wroth demystifies the roles of both the impossibly idealized female and the puckish, playful, sometimes penitent male in a more structured, sustained, and explicit manner than even Shakespeare’s famous anti-Petrarchan sonnet 130. 

Ultimately, Wroth’s love sonnets bring patriarchal myths into conflict with the desire to be freed from the constraining forces of patriarchal structures.  In this way, Wroth creates sonnets of resistance that dream of liberating both female and male bodies from the impossibly platonic ideals that typify love sonnets and that perfume the stench of court corruption.
 
References

Juliann Reineke, "Becoming a Woman in Frances Burney’s Evelina: Female Sociality and the Construction of Gender Identity"

Frances Burney’s Evelina has been viewed through the feminist lens many times over; scholars have focused on Evelina’s overall state of dependence vis-à-vis the male characters in her life, her struggle with finding her father, and the absence of her mother.  Even though these topics are important for any feminist interpretation of the novel, critics have neglected the importance of the relationships among the female characters.  I argue that these interactions between Evelina and the other female characters help mold her into a “woman.”  To make my case, I draw on Simone de Beauvoir’s foundational account of gender as a social construct.  My paper explores how female characters in the novel illustrate de Beauvoir’s theory that women internalize feminine ideals. Building on work by scholars such as Julia Epstein, Kristina Straub, Katharine M. Rogers, and Susan C. Greenfield, I extend de Beauvoir’s constructionist account by focusing specifically on moments when Evelina states her opinions regarding other female characters. 

Burney’s portrayal of Evelina amply demonstrates de Beauvoir’s thesis that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”  During her time in the country, Evelina is really quite sequestered from other women; she is woefully innocent and untouched by society.   When she visits London, she begins to interact with a variety of women and becomes educated in the ways of social decorum.  She learns how to act appropriately and discovers what types of behavior are acceptable and what types will cause her ruin in this patriarchal society.  For Evelina, the patriarchy is not stable; she is the ward of Mr. Villars, unacknowledged daughter of Sir John Belmont, and, later, wife to Lord Orville.  She must therefore rely on the women in her life to show her what is expected of women in the patriarchal system.  Through these interactions with other women, Evelina constructs her feminine identity.  In this way, my paper extends de Beauvoir’s model by suggesting the socio-interactional roots of gender identity.  As Burney’s text suggests, interactions among women facilitate the process by which they internalize particular gender ideals, even in instances where those ideals are inimical to their real interests. 
 
Works Cited
Panel II: Approaches to Narrative and Identity

Geordie Hamilton, “Consciousness of Family: Reading Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition as Historical Fiction”

Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition is nominally set in the fictional town of Wellington, but actually relates to events of the 1898 white supremacist race riot in the real town of Wilmington, North Carolina.  Commentators on Chesnutt’s novel (including Nancy Bentley, P. Delmar, Stephen Knadler and Eric Sundquist) have focused on the question of family.  Against the backdrop of the building tension and violent execution of the race riot, the plot brings two families—one black, one white, though the two families are related—into dramatic and tragic conflict.  But the story ends by holding out the clear hope that a reconciliation between the (black) Millers and (white) Carterets is possible, further suggesting that this particular racial reconciliation might be extended to blacks and whites in general.  In this paper, I draw on ideas from narrative theory to examine how the form of Chesnutt’s novel complements its exploration of racial ideologies at the thematic level. More specifically, I study how the modes of focalization deployed in the text require readers to unlearn racist attitudes, if they are to become full-fledged members of Chesnutt’s implied audience.

To make my case, and to suggest how form and theme work together in the novel to emphasize the importance of moving toward racial equality and reconciliation, I review key debates surrounding the concept of focalization and then demonstrate how Chesnutt’s strategic manipulations of point of view undercut the racist ideologies held by some of the characters.  I also show how Wayne Booth’s concept of the implied audience can be used to illuminate Chesnutt’s creation of a textual norm of racial equality.  Narratological accounts of focalization reveal how the narrator and characters form different perceptions and suggest why the narrator’s perceptions are privileged over those of the characters, especially those of the racist Carterets.  However, by showing how the Carterets move from unconsciousness toward consciousness and agreement with textual norms, the narrator preserves the Carterets as potentially sympathetic characters who might finally acknowledge their family ties with the Millers.  In turn, readers must hold out hope for just this sort of reconciliation if they are to join the implied audience of the novel.  Indeed, the hoped-for reconciliation of the Millers and the Carterets is part of a broader political message that Tradition carries as the text follows a path through fiction, into the real historical world of American race relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Works Cited
John Acker, “Fervid Conceptions: Narrating Revelation in Wieland"

Discourses of Christian revelation—the act or process of receiving specific knowledge from God—complicate the notion of a unitary narrating subject.  Those claiming revelation construct from it an integral part of their actions and worldview, but though this new knowledge acts through human agents its source is by definition non-human.  Accordingly, the speaker must narrate a double consciousness, one mediating his or her own voice and goals through (allegedly) divine instructions or standards.  Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) both represents this duality in its title character and thematizes the problem of individual agency in discourses of revelation.  Wieland, on trial for six murders, attributes his actions to instructions from “the element of heaven” which “no hues of pencil or of language can pourtray.” These instructions replace logic and rationality—the hallmarks of liberal thought in Brown’s day—with what Wieland characterizes as a “torrent of fervid conceptions.”  The text]compounds these narrative difficulties in interesting ways through its complex formal construction: Wieland’s testimony, a spoken account, is embedded in and mediated through written discourses of law, epistles, and fiction.  Additionally, by weaving into its verbal texture the oral and written misrepresentations of Carwin, the novel further complicates the context in which Wieland speaks.

My study examines Wieland’s confession as both a richly structured individual narrative and a fictive exploration of 18th-century debates over representation.  Drawing on Bakhtin’s theories of dialogic narrative as well as recent criticism of Wieland (particularly that of Warner Berthoff, Paul Witherington, Agnes Bonney, Rick Wallach, and Michael Schnell), I argue that Wieland’s narrative eccentricities—as well as his conception of revelation—flow directly from his fiercely individualistic relationship with God.  While most readings (with the notable exception of Schnell’s) have glossed over this aspect of the novel, instead emphasizing Wieland’s affinities (and departures from) traditional Gothic treatments of the supernatural, I believe this question is central to understanding both Brown’s text and larger historical tensions among 17th-century Puritanism, Quaker concepts of special revelation, and 18th-century secular Deism.  In a young nation convinced of “self-evident” truths, Wieland questions whether those truths can be narrated—indeed, whether they can be known at all.

Selected Bibliography

Joshua Gass, “‘Conceal’d and Discover’d’: Reading Contradiction in Moll Flanders”

Moll Flanders is a difficult work: its generic instability and the extensive contradictions in its narrative voice had critics through the 1960s and 1970s trying to create an integrated reading of the text by establishing and confirming Defoe’s irony and Moll’s narrative unreliability. More recent criticism has taken up an alternate possibility: to read the contradictions in Moll as meaningful in themselves (Richetti, Butler, Hansen). This paper examines various theoretical justifications for an interpretive practice grounded in contradiction, from the magisterial and over-reaching interpretations of Lévi-Strauss to various Marxist attempts to correlate textual forms with modes of social contradiction. I use these insights to frame an interpretation of the multi-leveled contradictions in Moll. Specifically, I combine formal narratological analysis with attention to the socio-historical context surrounding the production of Moll Flanders to demonstrate that incompatible definitions of human love fragment the text and underlie many of the contradictions that have been so problematic and so productive for Defoe criticism.

I begin by exploring how Defoe’s text is engaged in a very difficult project that recognizes, and pushes, the limitations of descriptive and narrative language: Moll represents consciousness and events as interdependent realities. In other words, the novel incorporates an understanding of the socially determined nature of human consciousness into its use of point of view. As a result, historical contradictions saturate the text at multiple levels, from characterization and narrative voice to the overarching moral norms of the implied author and the text’s particular conception of genre. These contradictions achieve their most overt and dissonant expression in the central “Lying-Inn” episode, which introduces the second-most dominant character in Moll. This character, the satanic and maternal Governess, personifies the contradictions of the text. On one hand, her manipulations of Moll represent the kind of external Necessity that Fredric Jameson theorizes as his justification for reading contradiction in the first place. At the same time, Moll’s relationship with the Governess is the closest she will ever come to meaningful human contact. The conflict between these two accounts of Moll’s and the Governess’s relationship, which appears to be founded simultaneoulsy on economic Necessity and on genuine affection, mirrors the contradictions in the text’s retrospective narrative voice, which alternately judges and justifies Moll’s previous actions. This double stance in turn reflects the book’s strange hybrid genre, a mixture of social criticism and morality tale, as well as Defoe’s wider ideological commitment to a particular form of Puritan individualism.  

References

Panel III: Postcolonial Theory, Postmodernism, and Neomarxism: Implications for Literary and Rhetorical Analysis

Gina Gemmel, “Can the Non-Subaltern Speak? Ethnic Identity and Literary Impersonation”

My paper focuses on ethnically impersonated narratives and their reception in the U.S.  Exploring impersonators such as Kent Johnson, who published under the persona of a Hiroshima survivor in the poetry collection Doubled Flowering:  From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, and Asa Carter and Timothy Barrus, who published The Education of Little Tree and The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams using the personas of Native Americans, my study examines the reception of these texts in the United States once the true identity of the authors had been exposed.  Building on the work of critics such as Laura Browder and Sabina Sawhney, my paper considers whether texts such as these “trap their readers further in essentialist thinking about race and ethnicity,” as Browder claims, or whether instead they point beyond this essentialist trap.  Specifically, I argue that the favorable critical response to these these texts at their release and harsh subsequent denouncement as inauthentic illuminates the essentialist underpinnings of modern-day concepts of ethnic identity—even in the face of ongoing critiques of essentialist discourse.
   
To frame my analysis of the three impersonations, I draw on the work of  postcolonial theorists such as Edward W. Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.  Said’s examination of the ways in which the West creates the Oriental is particularly revealing in my examination of impersonations in which white Americans construct ethnic identities.  Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason, which includes her path-breaking article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” suggests that impersonators who create voices for their invented Japanese and Native American identities cannot tell us anything of value about ethnic experience, a suggestion that my paper examines critically.  My investigation of impersonations recontextualizes both Said and Spivak’s claims, bringing them to bear on cases of consciously practiced mimicry. Overall, I seek to determine whether such mimed identities in fact offer any insight into ethnically diverse experiences, or whether the simulated identities remain firmly embedded in the Western culture that produced them.
 
References
Lizzie Nixon, “Past the First Post: Postcolonial Historiographic Metafiction in Catherine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie”

Historiographic metafiction as characterized by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism is a quintessentially postmodern genre. My paper, however, suggests that the rhetorical and conceptual moves associated with the genre can also be found in earlier, pre-postmodernist texts. Specifically, I argue that Catherine Sedgwick’s 1827 novel Hope Leslie, a text that reflects America’s then-new postcolonial status, explores the connection between history and fiction and challenges the idea that a “truth” about history can be represented (cf. Insko). Through its depiction of the ways in which Native Americans influence and appropriate “American” identity, the novel examines how the country’s newfound independence comes with questions about what constitutes a “true” American identity. Indeed, for Native Americans and women, for example, independence also created questions about why they could not participate in representative government. Hence my analysis focuses on the ways in which Sedgwick’s text, rooted in the cultural conditions of its time, suggests that Native Americans have never been heard, and that our only access to them is filtered through histories, which are inevitably biased.

This paper considers Sedgwick’s representation of the Native American Magawisca, drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s argument that the subaltern cannot, in fact, speak. Sedgwick acknowledges in the preface to the novel that colonial history is biased and that, if they could, Native American “historians or poets” (my emphasis) would tell a different story. Because they cannot speak, others have spoken for them, and continue to do so in Hope Leslie, which continually refers to the potential for unreliable translation and the biases of the recorders of history. As these concerns of Sedgwick’s text illustrate, we can never have direct access to a historical real, only alternate versions of history and, in Spivak’s words “the faint whisper of what could not be said” (NATC 2196). Synthesizing Spivak’s postcolonial theory and Hutcheon’s account of postmodernism, my paper examines how early American authors like Sedgwick anticipate postmodern questioning of the boundary between fiction and history.

References:

David Deutsch, “Re-connecting Music in Howards End: Forster’s Aesthetics of Inclusion”

Forster scholarship has only recently begun to touch upon the structural, symbolic, and philosophical role of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony within Howards End (Hanquart 1984; Foata 1996).  My paper extends this scholarship by refocusing the discussion around the shifts in the role of music throughout Howards End.  My larger aim is to show that Forster uses music to attempt a dialectical restructuring of the novel into a new form of art, one which transforms an aesthetics of social repression into one of social inclusion.  Hence, my study has implications not only for scholars of modernist fiction in general and Forster’s work in particular, but also for theorists of inter-art relations during the modernist period and indeed of the broader social and aesthetic dimensions of modernism itself.      

To lay the groundwork for my investigation of how Forster re-envisions  the relationship between art and society, I turn to Theodore W. Adorno’s final work, Aesthetic Theory, which explores the dynamic relationship between aesthetic and material forces of production in the domain of art.  According to Adorno, authentic early-twentieth-century art, art which is paradoxically both autonomous from and dependent upon social forces, marks changes in the modes of production through “[s]cars of damage and disruption,” evidence that “art desperately negates the closed confines of the ever-same” by enacting new forms of aesthetic existence.  Building on Adorno’s model, I argue that just such “scars” of change are evident in Howards End through Forster’s heavy-handed use of symbolism, as well as his reliance on an overtly ironic narrator.  Forster forcefully overturns traditional high art, here represented by Beethoven’s Fifth symphony, by borrowing the formal elements of musical performance, such as rhythm and variation, and re-appropriating them into the structure of his narrative.  In doing so, Forster attempts to free the driving force of music from the constraints of outdated, relatively hermetic cultural artifacts, such as concert tickets, musical scores, or the instruments themselves, and use it to enhance the accessibility of art as realized in the form of the modern novel.  At the same time, through his use of an ironic narrator, Forster suggests that such an aesthetic shift in form is necessitated by the evolving forces of material production in early-twentieth-century England, which render traditional artistic forms, such as Beethoven’s symphony, inaccessible to poorer, working class audiences.  Finally, I suggest that Forster’s synthesis of art forms enacts on the structural level the reconnection of disparate social classes, which is also idealized at the novel’s end through the birth of Helen Schlegel and Leonard Bast’s illegitimate child.  Consequently, the novel develops along both structural and thematic lines a transmutation of traditional art forms leading to a socially progressive aesthetic, rather than to an aesthetic of cultural decay as Adorno and Horkheimer feared. 
 
Works Cited
Jessica Clements, “Engagement Ring Advertisements: A Case Study of Debt and the Rhetoric of Need and Want”

In this study, I combine rhetorical and Neomarxist frameworks to examine the composition and function of engagement ring advertisements.  I start from the assumption that textual analysis in our consumer society must take on the question of what connects consumers to products and, more importantly, why our consumer desires have now bound us to debt.  Accordingly, I use both rhetorical analysis and Neomarxist theory to explore how the verbal and visual rhetorical operations of repetition, reversal, substitution and destabilization directly correlate with the manipulation of the consumers’ rhetorics of need and want in said advertisements.  A MasterCard commercial, for example, posits $9,000 as a petty price to pay for an engagement ring by glossing over this cost in a list of items not deemed “priceless.”  Foundational Neomarxist texts such as Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment shed light on the larger socioideological contexts that govern such rhetorical strategies used by capitalistic corporations; radio listeners, TV viewers, and website browsers all fall prey to their constructed identities as consumers bound by need to commodities they cannot afford. 

Drawing on Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of the transformation of individuals into objects of a culture industry that seeks to determine their every need, I supplement this account with Jameson’s argument that even our entertainment outside of capitalistic work becomes subsumed as a consumerist act of labor.  I use these Neomarxist concepts to motivate my claim that engagement ring advertisements constitute a site where the ideology of consumer society saturates verbal as well as visual discourse.  Specifically, I am concerned with the extent to which members of this consumer society employ the kinds of verbal and visual literacies needed to process advertisements’ simultaneous capacity to reflect and to influence behavior.  Using engagement ring advertisements as a case study, I consider how they reflect the assumed societal norm of heterosexuality  Analysis of the complex rhetorical operations at work in these advertisements (such as verbal and/or visual rhyme, antithesis, metonym, and metaphor) demonstrates the importance of acquiring rhetorical literacy, particularly visual literacy; consumers’ inability to process complex verbal and visual rhetorical designs contributes to the manipulative function of these ads consciously crafted by the advertiser.  The consumer’s rhetoric of want is compromised and becomes a rhetoric of false need.  Engagement ring advertisements, therefore, are a prime example of how new literacies are required to resist consumer manipulation and to curtail the increasing tolerance for personal debt. 

Click here for bibliography.


Panel IV: Desire, Interpretation, Genre: At the Interface between Text and Context

Joe Hess, “Freudian Approaches to the ‘Circe’ Episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses”

[abstract forthcoming]

Michele Wilbert, “Llorando por Tu Amor: Thwarted Expectation and Disruption of Audience Desire in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive”

Analysts of David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive have commented on the movie from a variety of theoretical standpoints, focusing special attention on the film’s overt reliance on symbolism and dreamlike structure.  Yet commentators have largely overlooked one of the film’s pivotal scenes, the scene set at the Club Silencio, which Lynch himself has singled out as an important clue for understanding the movie as whole. To unpack the rich symbolism embedded in this scene’s pre-recorded performance, the mysterious box Betty finds in her purse, and the haunting Spanish-language rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” (translated as “Llorando por Tu Amor”), my paper draws on Lacanian theory to explore the scene’s implications and significance. Using Lacan’s ideas to explore Diane’s frustrated desire for romantic and professional success, I also extend the Lacanian model from the world inhabited by Lynch’s characters to the audience itself.

I focus on ways in which Lynch’s overt play with generic conventions and character types, creation of temporal confusion via non-linear scene sequences, and refusal to resolve many of the film’s mysteries disrupt audience expectations throughout the movie; these interruptions and disjunctions result in a deferral of desire in the audience similar to that of the main character, Diane.  I argue that these playful efforts culminate in the movie’s apparent climax in the Club Silencio scene, in which the constructedness of the cinema experience – the pursuit of an Imaginary domain that masquerades as the Real – is revealed to be a futile attempt by the audience to find satisfaction of desires by identifying with an Other who is able to fulfill wishes in ways that the audience cannot.  Lynch reveals the sham by exposing the performance in the Club Silencio as artificial and hollow.  The song and the mysterious box serve the same purpose:  Rebekah Del Rio sings of loss and non-fulfillment of desires, while the box in which the blue key should be turned, thus unlocking the mysteries of the film and satisfying the audience’s desire, turns out to be a ruse that sucks the characters and the audience into a sort of mobius strip of unsated desire, in which they must perpetually return to points of frustration and dissatisfaction.  Thus, just as Diane’s fantasy self represents an elusive imagined identity that successfully navigates the perils of Hollywood, romance and intrigue, Lynch’s film (or any film) represents an idealized world for the audience, allowing them to indulge for two-hour blocks in fantasies of desire fulfillment and self-identification.

Bibliography
Dennis Wilson Wise, “McEwan’s Atonement and Todorov’s Fantastic: Rethinking Genre from the Standpoint of Reader Response”

Drawing on Tzvetan Todorov’s account of the fantastic as a literary genre, this paper both explores the generic status of Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement and uses McEwan’s text to reexamine the scope and limits of Todorov’s theory.  According to Todorov, the fantastic as a genre depends on the reader’s hesitation between two explanations of what occurs in the text – either that what happens is entirely natural or entirely supernatural.  This hesitation, Todorov argues, was made possible by the 19th-century view of reality that posited a clearly marked boundary between the real and the imaginary.  Since Todorov holds that there has been a decline in the belief of a fixed, external reality independent of all minds, according to him the fantastic as a genre is no longer possible; the premise it relied upon is gone.  In contrast to Todorov, however, I argue that a modern-day version of the fantastic is in fact possible, and that it is exemplified by McEwan’s novel.  Instead of forcing the reader to choose between two incompatible explanations of events in the story, Atonement creates a new form of the hesitation principle by blurring the very distinction between real and unreal.  By highlighting the extent to which Briony Tallis’s narrative has been constructed for specific, strategic purposes, the text renders certain events in the story undecidable.  In this way, the novel enacts what can be characterized as a distinctly postmodern appropriation of strategies that Todorov links with the fantastic, deploying them in ways not accounted for by Todorov’s model.

The first part of my paper reviews Todorov’s central claims about the fantastic as a genre and then draws on aspects of Atonement to explore the pertinence of the theory for McEwan’s novel.  I then turn to the way Todorov grounds his theory in the dynamics of reader response and use McEwan’s text to dispute the assumption that a theory of genre based on reader response entails an antifoundationalist position like Stanley Fish’s.  Specifically, elements of the text are given; these given elements are what ground the fantastic as a genre conceived as an assemblage of textual features, thus implying that the genre is not completely dependent on interpretative strategies.  The unreliable narration of Briony Tallus, for example, can be grounded in specific structural features of the novel.  I point out certain inconsistencies in Fish’s position and also suggest that, in connection with textual givens, an “internal realism” serves as a better alternate model than the “naïve” or “external” realism of Wolfgang Iser.  The views of Hilary Putnam are useful for my distinction; without relying on notions of objects “in-themselves” that exist independently of any conceptual scheme, Putnam argues that what is “real” nevertheless does not depend on culture or convention.  This distinguishes his views from Fish, on whose view interpretative communities are continuously shifting and unstable.  Using McEwan’s novel as a case study, I synthesize Putnam’s and Todorov’s ideas to argue that genre is not radically relative to a language or interpretative community.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Emerson Lowell, “Uncanny Freaks, Marvelous Clowns: Ontologies of the Other in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus”

Few critics have commented on Angela Carter’s complex use of carnival characters and settings in her 1984 novel Nights at the Circus.  In this study I redress this omission, drawing on Tzvetan Todorov’s account of the fantastic and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, as well as recent scholarship by Wendy Faris on magical realism, to explore Carter’s treatment of circus life.  Todorov argues that “the fantastic,” which he defines as a kind of interpretive hesitation, obtains when one cannot decide between a naturalistic and a non-naturalistic interpretation of events portrayed in a text.  In turn, Bahktin’s concept of the carnivalesque, derived from his readings of Rabelais and his own studies of popular carnival itself, suggests a literary celebration of “otherness” that overrides feelings of uncertainty.  Combining elements of these two modes is the genre of magical realism, which joins the real with the fantastical, particularly in places where Westerners interact with or imagine non-Western cultures.  My argument is that Carter’s text represents events whose peculiar force derives from the way they simultaneously challenge the distinction between the natural and the supernatural and the distinction between the socially privileged order and an offsetting order of “misrule.”  In this way, the novel interconnects a postmodern destabilization of ontology with a sustained inquiry into the power structures that bolster social hierarchies.

The analysis begins with an explication of Todorov’s, Bahktin’s, and Faris’ central arguments about the fantastic, the carnivalesque, and magical realism, respectively.  I then show how elements of these three modes play out within the novel.  Focusing on key episodes of the novel, I examine how it couples ontological play with an interrogation of the structures and manifestations of power.  For example, an examination of winged aerialist Fevvers’ abduction and escape from a Rosicrucian’s manor raises an array of questions, given that the episode itself delves into the authenticity of the performer’s plumage, the validity of ritual magic, and the limits of rebellion against a wealthy and powerful man.  Analyzing scenes such as this, I suggest how they draw simultaneously on the fantastic’s hesitation between the natural and supernatural, the carnivalesque’s temporary subversion of a dominant social order, and the strategic manipulation of the two in magical realism.  In closing, I suggest ways in which Foucauldian concepts of power can be positioned against Bahktin’s, Todorov’s, and Faris’ ideas to yield a new approach to unpacking and comprehending Carter’s text.

BIBLIOGRAPHY