Blockchain Papers

Darryl Chalk

No abstract is available for this record.

Kelvin Fatt Kin Low

No abstract is available for this record.

Wolfgang Giegerich

In the “Alchemy” issue of Spring Journal Stanton Marlan published his remarkable essay, “From the Black Sun to the Philosopher’s Stone.” The blackness of sol niger brought with it for Marlan “the mortificatio of brokenness, incision, and wound, castration, cut, negation, with an ultimate ‘No’ to the ego, with what felt unassimilable.” Time and again Marlan insists on there being something unassimilable. The blackness of sol niger is his proof and paradigm. He says he encountered a darkness that refuses conscious assimilation. But is this really true? No doubt, this blackness was initially “felt unassimilable”. But the fact that the psychic images have their own internal solidity, integrity, and intactness and don’t go away even when assimilated in no way means that there is an “unassimilable remainder” in the emphatic sense. The blackness of the black sun is by no means unassimilable, although of course not in the sense of assimilation as being incorporated by an ego stance.

Emily Madison

This dissertation makes a case for the Shakespearean stage in the modern Anglo-American tradition as a distinctive laboratory for producing and navigating theories of emotion. The dissertation brings together Shakespeare performance studies and the newer fields of the history of emotions and cultural emotion studies, arguing that Shakespeare’s enduring status as the playwright of human emotion makes the plays in performance critical sites of discourse about human emotion. More specifically, the dissertation charts how, since the late nineteenth century, Shakespeare performance has been implicated in an effort to understand emotion as it defines and relates to the “human” subject. The advent of scientific materialism and Darwinism involved a dethroning of emotion and its expression as a specially endowed human faculty, best evidenced by Charles Darwin’s 1871 The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Shakespeare’s poetic, formal expression of the passions was seen as proof of this faculty, and nowhere better exemplified than in the tragedies and in the passionate displays of the great tragic heroes. The controversy surrounding the tragic roles of the famous Victorian actor-manager Henry Irving illustrates how the embodied, human medium of the Shakespearean stage served as valuable leverage in contemporary debates about emotion. The dissertation then considers major Shakespearean figures of the twentieth century, including Harley Granville Barker, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and Peter Brook, whose “stages” similarly galvanize and reflect contestation and change in what William Reddy has called “emotional regimes” or Barbara Rosenwein “emotional communities.” For each of these figures, a specific emotional paradigm is at stake in staging Shakespeare and particularly Shakespearean tragedy. I engage with a range of sources, from performance reviews to popular psychology, to locate these canonical moments in Shakespearean performance history as flashpoints in a cultural history of emotion.

Edward Cohen

On 28 February 1895 Oscar Wilde arrived at his club, the Albemarle, after an absence of several weeks and was presented with an envelope containing the Marquis of Queensberry's calling card. On the back of the card were scrawled the words: "For Oscar Wilde Posing as a Somdomite [sic]." As the culmination of months of harassment by the Scottish aristocrat - who objected to Wilde's intimacy with his youngest son, Lord Alfred Douglas-the short text so incensed Wilde that it incited him to instigate legal action against its author. Filing charges under the 1843 Criminal Libel Act (6 and 7 Vict. I, c. 96), Wilde's legal representatives asked the court to interpret the marquis's text as a verbal attack upon his person and to hold its author criminally responsible for the consequences of his writing. Unfortunately for Wilde, the statute invoked on his behalf allowed the accused party a unique form of rejoinder: the defendant could assert his innocence by placing a competing interpretation of the alleged libel before the court - in what was termed a "plea of justification" - which sought to prove that the offending statement was both "true" and "published for the public benefit." If the court verified that both these conditions obtained, then the defendant would be deemed innocent of the charge and the libel found to be legally substantiated. Needless to say, the Marquis of Queensberry's lawyers quickly countercharged that such was the case. This defense tactic effectively transformed the legal proceeding in Wilde v. Queensberry into an interpretive contest both for determining the text's "true" meaning and for assessing its social significance. Hence, what was at stake in the proceedings of Wilde v. Queensberry was not simply whether or not the writing on the Marquis of Queensberry's card constituted a libel against Wilde, but also what it meant "to pose as a sodomite," whether Wilde had done so, and if publishing the knowledge of such a "pose" was in the public interest.\nFramed by the tenor of these questions, the trial necessarily foregrounded the specificity of the phrase "posing as a sodomite." Since the contested statement did not actually accuse Wilde of "sodomy" - or of being a sodomite - for which a strict standard of legal proof (i.e., proof of penetration) would have been required, the defense sought instead to show that Wilde was the kind of person--or at least that he had (re)presented himself as the kind of person-who would be inclined to commit sodomy. In support of this personification, the plea of justification tried to shift the legal focus on sodomy away from its traditional status as a criminally punishable sexual act so that it became in the defense's construction a defining characteristic of a type of sexual actor (the "sodomite"). In order to provide a credible standard of proof for this characterological claim, the defense's plea of justification listed thirteen allegations that "Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde . ..did solicit and incite ... [another male person] to commit sodomy and other acts of gross indecency." Here, playing upon the indeterminacy introduced by the word "posing," the defense interpretation subsumed the specific cultural and legal history evoked by the word "sodomy" with the newer, relatively unknown category, "acts of gross indecency," metonymically subsuming the former within the behavioral penumbra of the latter. Thus, even as the defense plea displaces "sodomy's" historical privilege as the sole basis for criminalizing sexual acts between men and constitutes it as one of a number of "other acts of gross indecency," the earlier concept is simultaneously recouped by the defense plea as the legitimating criterion through which a much wider variety of "indecent" relationships between men can be brought within the legal purview.

Joe Keener

When Harold Bloom produced his hyperbolic tome Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he did the bard a great disservice. Dramatization would have been a more accurate word choice than Invention and would have offered less of a distraction from Shakespeare's actual achievements. Hamlet remains Exhibit A in making the case that Shakespeare attempted to put more humanity on stage than those who had come before him. The title character is hardly a fully realized human, which may be a dramatic impossibility, but he does, at least, represent an element of humanity and, as such, can be examined in terms of forces that act on humans. One of these predominant forces is evolution. Matt Ridley argues in The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, “A Shakespeare play is about motives and predicaments and feelings and personalities that are instantly familiar. Falstaff's bombast, Iago's cunning, Leontes's jealousy, Rosalind's strength, and Malvolio's embarrassment have not changed in four hundred years. Shakespeare was writing about the same human nature we know today” (11). If audiences could not see elements of humanity in plays like Hamlet, they would be less likely to derive as much emotional, intellectual, and perhaps even aesthetic pleasure as they have for so long—this work and these characters cannot be reduced to merely cultural signifiers. The humanity expressed in Hamlet displays varied characteristics of the human and, therefore, human evolution. But first, to set the stage.Since the one-two punch of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1983) and Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1989), New Historicism and cultural materialism have dominated Shakespeare studies and interpretations. This dominance entails the study of culture; the employment of identity politics; and the historical contextualizing of texts, authors, and audiences. Indeed, even a cursory glance at quite recent editions of Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare Studies offers current articles: “Questions of Identity in Renaissance Drama” and “Recent Shakespeare Adaptation and the Mutations of Cultural Capital,” respectively. Johnathan Bate's Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (2009), one of a handful of current biographies, places Shakespeare in his cultural context in hopes of gaining insight into his life. On the other hand, Shakespeareans enthralled with French theory propose the most frequently used critical alternatives, Sausserian and deconstructive explications. Volumes such as Lacanian Interpretations of Shakespeare (Brooks and Sharon-Zisser, 2010) abound and articles using these theoretical stances are published regularly.Hamlet itself has been read and explicated through these critical lenses. David Bevington's most recent book, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages (2011), advertises its argument that the play can be seen as “a kind of paradigm for the cultural history of the English-speaking world.” Margreta De Grazia's seminal “Hamlet” Without Hamlet (2007) decenters “Hamlet” the character and focuses on historicism. Danish politics, possession of land, and a sense of historical epoch and empire inform De Grazia's book. While books about Shakespeare's play proliferate, the slate of recent journal criticism specifically about Hamlet seems scant in comparison. Articles concentrate on what seems like Hamlet esoterica, such as “The History of Air: Hamlet and the Trouble with Instruments.”Regardless, historical and cultural critiques have afforded scholarship great insights into Shakespeare and Hamlet. Yet the focus on cultural meanings has been to the detriment of the human, the biological, in the text. Small wonder evolution would not be considered, as without the biological it is a moot point. Multitudinous reasons exist for this neglect, from the old phantoms of “essentialism” and “reductionism” to the irrational fear that literature will become the handmaiden of science. Cultural critics worry they will be supplanted by what they often consider the antithesis of their work.To address the last first, reading Hamlet with an eye toward evolutionary forces is not a competing or alternative methodology. This theoretical approach, like the cultural critiques that came before it, just reveals another layer of meaning in the play. The slow breaking down of the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture into the biocultural causes “essentialism” to look a bit weathered, and, as Joseph Carroll has pointed out, all acts of criticism are reductive (Reading Human Nature 29). In his work Consilience, E. O. Wilson allays the fear of discipline subjugation by arguing that science explains feeling but art transmits it, each having a vital and different role in sharing culture.Literary Darwinism is different from current theoretical approaches in that it is more inclusive. Instead of dividing us by our respective cultures, it brings us together under the aegis of our humanity. Biocultural readings of literature allow critics to experience Shakespeare's texts in a different light, looking for the human and the evolutionary forces that act upon it, and literary critics are beginning to take notice and think about their work in these terms. Perhaps no one has led this charge harder than its founder, Joseph Carroll. His essential Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (2004) and his more recent Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice (2011) have done much to propagate this school of thought. The important The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Sloan Wilson and Gottschall, 2005) was followed by Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader (Boyd, Carroll, and Gottschall, 2010). The latter volume demonstrates just what literary Darwinism can reveal about varied works of arts. Brian Boyd's insightful On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2009) has paved the way for further inquiry.Shakespeare studies have just begun to explore the implications of this theoretical perspective, from Marcus Nordlund's tour de force Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution (2007) to Philip Davis's Shakespeare Thinking (2009). Joseph Carroll's recent article “Intentional Meaning in Hamlet: An Evolutionary Perspective” (2011) uses said perspective to discuss Hamlet's personality, depression, and the psychosymbolic significance of mothers. Thinking of the biological in relation to Shakespeare has also led to other considerations, such as cognition, Arthur F. Kinney's Shakespeare and Cognition (2006) being a prime example of this kind of scholarship. There is still much work to be done in this fertile field, and no play lends itself more readily to literary Darwinism than Shakespeare's Hamlet.Natural selection's most profound impact on human evolution is large, costly brains that can be both adaptive and maladaptive, depending on environmental circumstances. Clearly the former outweighs the latter or natural selection would have not acted on these organs in the manner it has, but there are both costs and benefits, and Shakespeare dramatizes these all-too-human attributes. One important benefit is the human mind. Steven Pinker differentiates between “brain” and “mind” in How the Mind Works when he asserts, “The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding and outmaneuvering objects, animals, plants, and other people” (21). How fascinating that this “foraging” mind is on display in Hamlet. After all, what is the play but constant repetitions of characters computing means of outmaneuvering each other? Hamlet's brain is the evolved, computational machine that allows him to “put an antic disposition on” to deal with his newfound foe Claudius and his father's revenge (1.5.189),1 or when he outmaneuvers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's attempt to carry out Claudius's plan by telling Gertrude, “But I will delve one yard below their mines / and blow them at the moon. O, 'tis most sweet / When in one line two crafts directly meet” (3.4.209–11). Claudius, Polonius, and Laertes all endeavor to outmaneuver Hamlet, and the prince tries to do the opposite, while Gertrude, Horatio, and Ophelia offer varied attempts to compute their most successful positions between these two poles. An adapted mind enables these characters to make these moves and function within their environments—some more successfully than others.There is, however, a cost, a maladaptive component. Joseph Carroll notes in Literary Darwinism, “The brain produces a new adaptive problem—it causes confusion and uncertainty. The human brain allows for unparalleled flexibility of response to environmental conditions, but to achieve this flexibility it must cut human cognition loose from any rigidly programmed set of instinctual behaviors. In a dangerous and challenging world that demands decisive action oriented to adaptively functional goals, confusion and uncertainty are potentially fatal disabilities” (XXI). Hamlet's inability to act on his revenge has been much written about in scholarship concerning the play, but the fact that we may be seeing the adaptive problem of a human brain dramatized for the stage has not been considered. When Hamlet first learns of Claudius's treachery from the ghost of his father, his immediate response is “O, my prophetic soul! Mine Uncle!” (1.5.46). Hamlet knew the truth from the opening, but his big brain enabled him to disregard his instinct to preserve himself by ignoring his guilty uncle. Hamlet's reticence helps define him as a character, and he will continue to overlook his instincts throughout the play by overthinking, such as when he catches a guilty Claudius praying, postevidence of his crimes, but stays his hand with “That would be scanned” (3.4.78). Instead, he chooses to make his entire life a drama, feigning madness while offering long, philosophical speeches to an audience of one, himself.This tendency for the dramatic points to the adaptive side of these large human brains. They have enabled humans to produce art, a cross-cultural phenomenon that must serve some evolutionary function to be such a consistently selected behavior. Ellen Dissanayake considers the ramifications of this ability in Homo Aestheticus when she points out, “We have evolved in a world and are designed to live in that world, although our also evolved but overdeveloped ability to ‘leave’ that world and construct whole realms of abstract thought or fanciful imaginative alternatives permits us to disguise or forget our ultimate dependence on that inescapable base reality” (149). Shakespeare and we, his audience, use the fictive world of drama to escape the base reality of our own lives. Hamlet himself illustrates this propensity when he moves quickly from his interrogation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to exhorting the players, “We'll have a speech straight: come, give us a taste of your quality: come, a passionate speech” (2.2.379–80). At the same time art generally, and drama more specifically, can serve an even more practical purpose. As David Sloan Wilson asserts in The Literary Animal, “Stories serve the function of transmitting and coordinating local appropriate behavioral norms and thus, are directly beneficial to the individuals (and groups) that participate in them” (qtd. in Nettle 62).This paradox of absence and presence permeates Hamlet and aids audiences in understanding its relationship with drama. The title character uses this art form to escape his world; at the same time he employs drama to understand how to live in his world—how to are the nature of both and The paradox in our world and with it both through drama. Hamlet this when he has the the The Murder of as this art form enables him to know how to act in this The relationship between art, the and the human in Hamlet is even more perhaps even must be and Shakespeare's has a from to the Danish a of at the of the play. Hamlet produces an aesthetic to his new his and his quite but he attempts to deal with the in his by using a set of for an than for a Hamlet come to out of his father's and In other Hamlet act like a like a and he art will solve his Hamlet's to art as a can be seen in his response to the of when he to or he to / he for / would he do / he the and the for / I Hamlet himself an and a and himself This for drama that for Hamlet the even a more set of would be more adaptive for this the play another example of a character who his by not understanding his relationship to art, Claudius is with false and, in Hamlet's reduced to a for to him from the art of the and the guilty The that Hamlet and Claudius is their inability to in their brains art and their to maladaptive for They are both in The wonder both characters are to such fictive of and there are that in this Hamlet also allows the players, in to local appropriate behavioral Hamlet “a speech of some / or which I would set down and In the of norms through the is not just the out of but also the of through the display of its While the is to Claudius's the is to such as the relationship between father, and to set a for in the of this was not to be in the dangerous world of offers an evolutionary not to Hamlet and his explains the impact of this when he in The of two of in the same came into the one being a of and who to the other of to and each this would without a and the While and are not of successful still of for Claudius could be read as much as a for a of his and by it as being the as it can be read as actual toward a act as a to Hamlet, but his so to that of the as and Shakespeare reveals with the which one will their The Evolutionary and the of and the alternative to one from our evolutionary history and from our the of and through and force would as of and would be to and and are at in Claudius's Perhaps both Hamlet and Claudius do not this as Hamlet for his father's and Claudius with and are with a of and just to a that will some of Shakespeare's play have that when “The to she the is and is for most immediate This in the play, this for is all that is the of Hamlet, be at evolution offers an on in and in on the ability to when to and when not to may be at the of the mind it is so essential for humans to at to in a relationship or a that may offer or to directly and in Hamlet are just how much they will with the Claudius explains to Laertes he has not Hamlet for to a I not / the great the Claudius this with for he he is with how he into and he in the the Hamlet himself how and when he will with Claudius's he would have just him and be done with Hamlet to his by feigning which offers him a from competing In a Hamlet himself an for this may at first but it has its in evolutionary as reveals the relationship between and evolution when he asserts, has us with a much like a at and role is to it and its (qtd. in in Darwinism and we are is the way selection produce we look to our own when it to and and so But we are and there are to being we have this to make us in this sense is an just like any Hamlet moves from to be the is much with his to to himself and to the just be the of the play, and Hamlet on the that is Claudius not with a sense of Polonius, perhaps not even this this is and the play in as a This line of is not to that the character Hamlet is his of Ophelia and the he him that such a reading is but had these characters a system that the they would have had the to be more the of are other to being and to both and In On the Origin of Brian out the the for from the to and of and to to them to Hamlet all these he one may and and be a and in between and my I your and not it your own what / from this to Hamlet the entire play to these in his His role in the drama is to out how to to his In other he these which would have an on the as by Steven of these is quite In Evolutionary The New of the David asserts, within an be of the about will Shakespeare with Hamlet is that not element of is Hamlet a a and their relationship in his has no to from a of and a If this a of his no wonder the prince to / The and the natural / is may have the for great but their and not for humans the but also for fictive within of Shakespeare's one “The of it is so great that even can readily be have of into its force by even when it and use the and Perhaps this phenomenon explains is an than a and is to himself while Hamlet not out of some but his has him into Hamlet's dramatizes what when of In other Shakespeare's play reveals the between for the versus that of the and the work is with characters to their biological even at the of their the title character is to do make attempts to their biological for their own and Hamlet himself by being on with both Claudius and Polonius, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's but his of is his not to with Claudius and revenge for his father's Claudius's the world take / are the most immediate to our Hamlet is hardly to his In he has as he have his to the there is the of Hamlet, and and the prince as he in most to his Hamlet that act as a to such as is, all, of “a a is / Hamlet the and which can be from that I I even in Yet not there remains a about reading these They are and behavioral and these can be and by such as the of a and Hamlet have a for and his are by his disposition and Hamlet's of it can be to the action of the play, as Ophelia to father, my of / his to Hamlet's selection is by Polonius, who is to his when he this / scant in your but it is the and the implications of versus that at the of Hamlet's Claudius is his and that his Hamlet's in have been frequently in stage as having both and Hamlet his as he “But not to / a have it and this throughout his with his Hamlet employs a between his and Claudius to Gertrude, but he is in with his even is out as a his with Claudius is at one of in terms. A also between how he with his and his of Ophelia just the be or not to both are out of and of understanding Hamlet would not have had the to consider the evolutionary implications of or Claudius's in The that in the a is and frequently to the and is to the as much as to the on to out that in of these to with who and have in the dominance Claudius and are like in Shakespeare's play. to Claudius, Hamlet asserts, cannot it for at your / The in the is / upon the Hamlet's charge of and perhaps by he the of selection on both his and his and quickly out of alternative seems to see his for as or the David of the motives of is the of and in the local these elements are at in Hamlet, and the title character is to his revenge as much by the to local as by the ghost of Hamlet the is likely when an has a reduced ability to to his or own Hamlet's within his his ability to to his own throughout the play and could his of Yet all is not in Hamlet, human or evolutionary and David are all for evolutionary work is in cognition, human and is a is an and focuses on evolutionary and human in they all have one in they consider adaptive and maladaptive as a of evolutionary all on the adaptive nature of and evolutionary these being Stephen Evolutionary on what those who adaptive and evolutionary as and guilty of argues that some are merely what he a of side with no adaptive function even the brain as such Steven and all side with on this in As we more about cognition, and evolutionary no have to its concerning or the said the are most in and essential work The Evolutionary and the of therefore, the evolutionary elements of Hamlet are in terms of The of a large and natural and selection's implications have all been out in Shakespeare's and examined in the of adaptive or maladaptive characteristics or behaviors. Shakespeare Hamlet with of and human are to in The Origin of that Shakespeare offers as his to a he an even evolutionary function for in a more sense when he can offer us to our immediate or we can to function Shakespeare's both and Without a that Yet of all the of this and and as different and read and of Hamlet, evolution and Shakespeare's play to our role in that drama in its own to

Laurence Roth

Drawing Contracts:Will Eisner's Legacy Roth Laurence (bio) Will Eisner . The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2006. Pp. xx + 498. Joann Sfar . The Rabbi's Cat. New York: Pantheon Books, 2005. Pp. 152. Joann Sfar . Klezmer. Book One: Tales of the Wild East. New York and London: First Second, 2006. Pp. 144. JT Waldman . Megillat Esther. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2005. Pp. v + 172. On January 5, 2005, the New York Times published its obituary for Will Eisner, one of the most lauded figures in the world of comics and graphic novels, who had died three days earlier in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after quadruple bypass surgery. On January 6 the Times ran the following correction: "An obituary of the innovative comic-page illustrator Will Eisner yesterday included an imprecise comparison in some copies between his character The Spirit and others, including Batman. Unlike Superman and some other heroes of the comics, Batman relied on intelligence and skill, not supernatural powers."1 One can only imagine the torrent of e-mails from comics fans pointing out this crucial difference and clucking at the writer's obvious lack of knowledge about the recondite world of superhero comics. It is a difference, of course, that makes even more apt the comparison between Bob Kane's dour, night-stalking masked detective and the dapper, night-stalking masked detective who made Eisner famous in the early 1940s. Both characters were the creations of Jewish comics artists, friends in fact, who attended DeWitt Clinton High School together in the Bronx and grew up during the Depression. It was they and their peers, also primarily Jewish, primarily New Yorkers, who made the comic book form. They helped that form, as Michael Chabon writes in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, "articulate a purpose for itself in the marketplace of ten-cent dreams: to [End Page 463] express the lust for power and the gaudy sartorial taste of a race of powerless people with no leave to dress themselves."2 But Batman and The Spirit also share something else in common. Because they were human rather than superhuman heroes they exemplified a different kind of balance between the "archetypal" and the "typical," Umberto Eco's terms for the mythic and the mimetic dimensions of comic book characters.3 Both Batman and The Spirit, even in their earliest incarnations, intimated that comic book protagonists and stories were capable of transcending stereotypes and reflecting temporal progression and psychological depth. This is perhaps one reason why Frank Miller chose Batman as the character with which to remake the image of the comic book superhero in the 1980s. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns presented comic book readers with a fallible hero in a surprisingly self-reflexive formula story. Eisner, on the other hand, retired The Spirit in 1952. In the latter years of The Spirit's twelve-year run Eisner tired of the demands of a formulaic comic strip, and his work evidenced an increasing interest in formal concerns, in applying to his work the visual lessons of Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, and film noir. Eisner's turn to educational and commercial work in the fifties and sixties, though a lucrative and smart career move, was, in a sense, a waiting period—waiting for comic books to catch up to him, waiting for the right opportunity to explore characters and stories in a more innovative manner. That period ended in 1972 when, as he recounted in a 1990 essay in the New York Times Book Review, he attended his first comic-book convention: "I met the new breed of comic cartoonists for the first time. Long-haired, wild-eyed and intense, they spoke the language of comics. It was a language that gave voice to their protest and social ideas. I wanted to be part of the excitement again."4 Inspired by underground and adult comics of the sixties and early seventies, Eisner took up specifically Jewish characters and topics in a new comics form to which he gave the name "graphic novel." As he says in the introduction to Norton's handsome collection of his first three graphic...

Holly A. Crocker

B eginning with a broken metamorphosis, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess attempts to resolve the scandal of gender’s visuality through its relational construction of a memorial poetics. In the Ovidian story, metamorphosis saves Alcyone from suicide; this transformation revives her and reifies her husband, changing both into sea birds. 1 Chaucer’s rendition sees Alcyone dead within three days of the return of her husband’s body. Mortality, along with its ultimate proof, death, is more visible in Chaucer’s poem than in his sources. 2 Chaucer’s treatment of the Ceyx and Alcyone narrative thus reveals a suspicion of superficial visions that is relevant to the larger composition to which it belongs. This account, like the Black and White story it presages, is a tangible arrangement of differences that are narrative, visual, and topographic. 3 Because gender difference is staked on degrees of visual distance in the Book of the Duchess , this chapter addresses the spatial arrangement of perspective across its aesthetic, religious, scientific, and philosophical contexts. The process of spatial arrangement is more relational than linear in the poem itself, so the argument of this chapter will follow the poem’s meandering path in order to address the artistic, religious, and intellectual controversies that Chaucer finesses through his creation of a powerful feminine image. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Shelton Waldrep

In Oscar Wilde's Portrait of WH we have an essay on the exigencies of interpretation presented to us as though it were a melodramatic murder mystery. As Scott Wilson describes it: After an opening discussion about Art as the realization of personality beyond and its ethical demands, Lord Erskine tells the story of his dead friend Cyril Graham, who devised a theory about the young man of Shakespeare's sonnets. Graham, an effeminate boy player of Shakespeare's roles at Trinity, decided that the Mr. WH of the sonnets must have been, like him, a boy player on Shakespeare's stage called Willy [sic] Hughes. Graham assembles what he believes is convincing textual evidence for his theory and attempts to persuade Erskine who, while accepting the internal evidence, will not be converted until he has seen external proof of the boy's existence. Graham provides a miniature painting. It is exposed as a fake, a simulacrum, and he shoots himself, substituting the reality of his own life and death for that of Willy Hughes. (231-232) Wilde's endlessly interpretable tale points to, among other things, the impossibility of ever really knowing the difference between the fake and the real--even in a situation in which the end result is a death caused by the illusion of evidence. In addition to raising questions about what we might now call post-structuralist hermeneutics, Wilde also warns that the mistaking of the fake for the (and vice versa) can have a material effect. The essays for this special issue investigate just what is at stake in the idea of the real as defined by the artists and thinkers of the Victorian era. Rather than approaching the dichotomy of realism vs. artificiality as it is usually defined for the period--that is, realism vs. any number of complementary binary terms such as neo-mediaevalism, Hellenism, etc.--I would like to call into question just how stable such a binary really was. That is, Victorians were always extremely invested in the fake--even in the authenticity of fakery, such as Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc's Gothic designs for Notre Dame de Paris or A. C. Swinburne's invented rural dialects in which he would write the epics of a region and recite them to the people living there who were convinced that he had indeed uncovered a real poem. If so much of Victorian culture was based upon the elaborate creation of simulacra--whether Pre-Raphaelitism or the legends of Tannhauser and Arthur--then why do we persist in seeing the Victorian period as the height of realism, and how might we explain how that period managed to derive so much pleasure from the inability to tell the fake from the real? If the origins of modernism are in the Victorian period, then it behooves us to understand also how postmodernism can trace some of its own origins to the dyadic quality of the Victorian pleasure in simulacra. As clearly obsessed with finding origins as the Victorians were, they seemed always to re-create the past in a form that expressed more about their anxieties about the future (or the present) than it did a clear understanding of even the immediate past. In a similar attempt to turn away from modernism and back toward history, the postmodern artist is often not interested in the past as material reality but as the quotation of a style--a temporal fragment that metonymically stands in for an entire era but may go no deeper than the glossy surface of a label. The extent to which Victorian writers manipulated the surfaces of commodification--and were likewise taken over by them in their own interest in the question of origins and authenticity--is what this volume attempts to explore. The Victorians knew they had the opportunity to be mythmakers, and they took this role on with all the earnestness they could muster; that more was going on than (sometimes) met the eye is proof that the Victorians themselves could be lost in the dizzying simulacra that their culture produced. …