English
Tongues on Fire: Alternative Ways of Voicing Resistance to Normative Femininity in Nineteenth Century Victorian Literature
An important aspect of the role womanhood in the nineteenth century is voicelessness: speaking out against or communicating dissatisfaction with the patriarchal ideology which dominated womens cultural reality was not simple or easy to do. Literature by women in this era seems to respond to oppressive norms of gender by creating female characters who redirect their suppressed voices in creative and often grating but subversive ways. Jane Austens Persuasion and Charlotte Brontes Villette characterize the unappealing woman as Mary Musgrove, the whining and weak sister, and Lucy Snowe, the judgmental and standoffish school teacher. What these women characters share is a reaction to patriarchal constraints that is subversive even while it seems perverse (or, perhaps, not feminist). In fact, it is the perversity of these womens methods of resisting norms of femininity which speaks most greatly to their marginal space and their feminist impulses.
Nursery Rhymes and Children’s Games in the Plays of Tina Howe
Tina Howe uses nursery rhymes and childrens games much as parents use them: to amuse and distract, while attending to and instructing in the nuance and cadence of language. When separated from the rhythm and rhyme, the words of the nursery rhymes in One Shoe Off (the title itself being from a nursery rhyme) and Prides Crossing depict fanciful and unnerving themes. Behind the rhythm and rhyme lie lifes oddities. By attending to Howes use of nursery rhymes and games in One Shoe Off and Prides Crossing, her audience must return to their earliest language acquisition to contemplate what they have taken for granted, while being jolted into realizing they had accepted the surreal early in their lives, and examine how Howes absurdist themes use those nursery rhymes as resonance for the study of language, its use in her plays, and in their own lives.
Howes use of childrens games in Birth and After Birth (musical chairs), Approaching Zanzibar (geography game), One Shoe Off (dress up and Concentration), Coastal Disturbances (shell game), Prides Crossing (dress up and croquet) serves a similar purpose. These games instruct children in how to play by prescribed rules. Ironically, even with rules someone must win and someone must lose. Howe, as with the nursery rhymes, uses her absurdist skills to demonstrate how these childhood games contribute to the delusion that there are prescribed rules for life.
The Last Regulator of the Fictive: Making Connections and Finding Precursors to David Markson’s Vanishing Point
In this paper I weave together three short essays with reactions to and comments on the act of reading David Marksons novel Vanishing Point. Italicized sections are a dramatization of one readers attempt to puzzle out this unconventional work, which, in its simplest form, is constructed of the detritus of the lives of great Artists. The essays view the piece through a critical framework (Foucault), make an important connection between this work and The Anatomy of Melancholy, a seminal creative/scientific work from the 17th Century, and suggest a possible scientific-cultural extension of the ideas discussed, through memetics. These essays are both digressive and progressive. In its totality, the paper offers a relational, discursive, and not nearly comprehensive reading of Marksons elliptical novel, which is both experimental and traditional.
Cape Town Meets the Classroom: Fostering Global Citizenship Through Writing About Study Abroad
This paper will describe our experiences teaching Global Literature to first-year students in Lehigh Universitys Global Citizenship Program (GCP). After participating in an intersession trip to Cape Town, we returned to help our students process their experiences through carefully-selected African written and filmic texts and individually-tailored writing assignments. We designed the syllabus with two questions in mind: How can we transcend the identity of the traveler and become global citizens? What can we do in our own backyards? The first addresses the process of self-reflection, evaluation, and transformation the students undergo. In reading contemporary African stories and reflecting on the trip, we hope each student will begin to understand his/her place in the world and his/her potential to impact the global community. The second emphasizes that the global citizen can apply what s/he has learned abroad to his/her own community. Our course stresses that travel is not merely a one-way trip, but instead a means of adapting lessons learned in the world to ones everyday experiences. A commitment to collaborative learning, interdisciplinary approaches, and the understanding that global citizenship is not a moral imperative informs our pedagogy; each student must come to his/her own definition of global citizenship. Our paper will share our observations of the students transformations articulated through their writing and explain the courses rationale.
Gayle Rubin and Cooper’s “The Spy”: War, Trauma, Rupture, and the Traffic in Women
James Fenimore Coopers revolutionary war novel “The Spy” (1821) foregrounds the trafficking of women in a male patriarchal society, a representation that can be closely analyzed alongside Gayle Rubins well-known essay The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex (1975). The ambiguous nature of female identity during this period relates to a breakdown of fundamental assumptions underlying the traditional structure of the sex/gender system. Close bonds formed between men during war challenge the power of heterosexuality that constrains female sexuality. As Coopers men are traded back and forth between loyalist and rebel camps, the clear line between the traders and the traded becomes ambiguous. Women can use this opportunity in the breakdown of gender roles to inscribe themselves into a traditionally male-dominated sphere. The juxtaposition of Frances with her sister Sarah in Coopers novel highlights fundamental differences in these two contrasting sex/gender systems. Sarah represents a more traditional victim of the traffic in women, while Frances is ambiguously an active participant of, and victim to, this same system. Trauma felt by Sarah occurs in an instantaneous manner, and repeatedly haunts her throughout the novel. Frances, on the other hand, escapes the most severe forms of this experience. War ruptures this characters maturation process from youth to womanhood, and allows her to participate in male systems of exchange as a result. The revolutionary war, in this context, serves as a particular moment in history when traditional social structures are temporarily challenged by an ambiguous displacement of gender roles.