The Gamut: A Journal of Ideas and Information, No. 17, Winter 1986

CONTENTS OF ISSUE NO. 17, WINTER, 1986 Louis T. Milic: Stories of Love-For Women Only, 3 Authors reveal a glimpse into the competitive world of romance-writing. James G. Thompson: Historical Errors About the Ancient Olympic Games, 20 Historians have been wrong about the Olympic Games since they began. Bonnie Herbst: She Ducked into a Phone Booth ..., 25 Havens for superheroes, G-men, and stocking-straighteners-how did we ever do without them? Gary Fincke: Short Story, Binghamton Bus , 35 Robert Cluett: The Fall of the House of Cruse-The Politics of Wine, 42 The story behind the scam that shook the French wine industry. Lester Adelson: Handguns and Criminal Violence, 55 Cuyahoga County\u27s deputy coroner takes a stand on the handgun control issue. Peter Salm: Undoing Babel, 61 The perils of translation-can it be both beautiful and true? John Hinds: The Mysterious Language of Japan, 67 How to address a Japanese greengrocer, and the solutions to other language problems in Japan. (Latest of The Gamut\u27s Languages of the World series.) David B. Guralnik: Word Watch. Neologisms: A Corporate Vocabulary, 72 Bethany S. Oberst: The Case of Dr. Berjot: a Lesson in Creative Autobiography, 74 The elusive line between life and literature. From “A Voyage to New Orleans by Dr. E. Berjot., 81 Jesse Bier: Humor in Israel, 87 Is it OK to be funny at the Third International Conference on humor in Tel Aviv? BACK MATTER John A. Flower: Professional Art and Popular Art: Principles and Prescriptions, 92 David Evett: New Play House Not For Plays, 95https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/gamut_archives/1014/thumbnail.jp

Special relationships: Anglo-American affinities and antagonisms 1854-1936

This collection of essays by leading scholars of American literature and culture has emerged out of recent debates on the historical, geographical, symbolic, and cultural significance of the Atlantic, as well as new work in the area of Transatlantic Studies. In a series of fascinating essays the authors have produced diverse and innovative interventions in the field of Anglo-American literary relations. The authors discussed range from Gertrude Stein to Alfred North Whitehead, Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Sarah Grand, Henry James to George Eliot, Elizabeth Stoddard to Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain to Walter Scott through to Djuna Barnes and Evelyn Waugh. Subjects discussed include Scottish-American literary relations, the Atlanticist dimension of Spiritualism, American interventions in the debate about Highland clearances, American slavery and British pastoralism. Table of contents: 1 Did Mark Twain bring down the temple on Scott’s shoulders? / Susan Manning 2 Stowe’s sunny memories of Highland slavery / Judie Newman 3 Gothic legacies: Jane Eyre in Elizabeth Stoddard’s New England / Anne-Marie Ford 4 Our Nig: fetters of an American farmgirl / R.J. Ellis 5 Crossing over: spiritualism and the Atlantic divide / Bridget Bennett 6 Poet of comrades: Walt Whitman and the Bolton Whitman Fellowship / Carolyn Masel 7 Nation making and fiction making: Sarah Orne Jewett, The Tory Lover, and Walter Scott, Waverley / Alison Easton 8 Beyond the Americana: Henry James reads George Eliot / Lindsey Traub 9 ‘If I Were a Man’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Grand and the sexual education of girls / Janet Beer and Ann Heilmann 10 ‘Embattled tendencies’: Wharton,Woolf and the nature of Modernism / Katherine Joslin 11 Unreal cities and undead legacies: T.S. Eliot and Gothic hauntings in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Barnes’s Nightwood / Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik 12 Encounters with genius: Gertrude Stein and Alfred North Whitehead / Kate Fullbroo

Special relationships: Anglo-American affinities and antagonisms 1854-1936

This collection of essays by leading scholars of American literature and culture has emerged out of recent debates on the historical, geographical, symbolic, and cultural significance of the Atlantic, as well as new work in the area of Transatlantic Studies. In a series of fascinating essays the authors have produced diverse and innovative interventions in the field of Anglo-American literary relations. The authors discussed range from Gertrude Stein to Alfred North Whitehead, Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Sarah Grand, Henry James to George Eliot, Elizabeth Stoddard to Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain to Walter Scott through to Djuna Barnes and Evelyn Waugh. Subjects discussed include Scottish-American literary relations, the Atlanticist dimension of Spiritualism, American interventions in the debate about Highland clearances, American slavery and British pastoralism

From Bluebeard's castle to the white world of dreams : constrictions and constructions in Angela Carter's prose fiction

Angela Carter's death in 1992 heralded a surge of popularity and tributes. These latter tended to cast her as a "fairy godmother" or "white witch", labels which this thesis takes as starting points in its examination of the roles of author, narrator, hero, environment and reader; their interchangeability; and mutual affect. It focuses on the construction of the subject and her or his environment in Carter's fiction, measuring their interaction by way of generic filters, criticism, interviews and journalism. The introduction examines Carter's strategies and agenda within this context by way of a historical exploration of the Western subject's perception of her/his surroundings, with particular regard to the postmodern and feminist viewpoints. This is followed by an account of Carter's own publishing history envisaged as a landscaped, picaresque journey which typifies her characteristic blend of idealism and pragmatics. Her juxtaposition of the fantastical with the familiar continues to resurface as part of the debate in subsequent chapters, which use a succession of literary and cultural tools to illumine her texts in the light of the main project. Thus: her short fictions, radio plays and the film The Company of Wolves are examined as fairy tales; The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and Villainsexplored using theories of the Gothic and the dystopia; Love and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman assessed in light of pornography and the picaresque; The Passion of New Eve viewed in terms of constructions of gender; and Nights at the Circus and Wise Children seen alongside theories carnival and of time. Elements of film theory, urban studies and architecture are threaded throughout, and some conclusions are offered through a reading of the important tropes of dream and labyrinth in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders. Always, subversive and unpredictable, Carter's writing can nevertheless be viewed as a succession of rewritings depicting an evolution of a subject initially vulnerable to but ultimately able to manipulate history. This is signalled most clearly by the early figure of the witch-hysteric. She is gradually transformed into the sibyl-prophetess of the later texts, while in a parallel dynamic, the environment's external threatening constructions have been dismantled in favour of a self-fashioning world full of possibility

2012 Literary Review (no. 25)

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“Things are not separate”: literary symbiotic metamorphoses in the fiction and critical work of A. S. Byatt

My critical project in this dissertation examines the way Byatt’s work productively moves across, and in and out of apparently conflicting theoretical debates, such as Leavis’s views on reading and writing in the light of poststructuralist and feminist theoretical approaches; or the establishment of a separate female literary tradition within the male literary canon; or the postmodernist resistance to/ rejection of realist representation, to name but a few of the debates examined in this dissertation. Hence, it is not my intention to superimpose a particular theoretical view on my analysis of Byatt’s work, but rather analyse their particular relevance in the light of Byatt’s own politics of writing. I propose the term “literary symbiotic metamorphosis” to investigate Byatt’s negotiation of apparently conflicting theoretical debates, in which she examines the validity of each individual theory vis-à-vis their symbiotic relationship, and then reshapes them into a unique poetics of writing which combines the understanding of a text’s symbiotically creative as well as theoretical relationships with the capacity to rearrange them into a practice of writing which is much more than the sum of the different parts which constitute it. My term is also informed by the Hegelian dialectic as the critical investigation of “a process of change in which a concept or its realization passes over into and is preserved and fulfilled by its opposite” (Merriam Webster) in which “some assertible proposition (thesis) is necessarily opposed by an equally assertible and apparently contradictory proposition (antithesis), the mutual contradiction being reconciled on a higher level of truth by a third proposition (synthesis)” (Thesaurus). It is in light of all these interconnected threads that I will investigate Byatt’s creative and critical work.O meu projeto crítico nesta dissertação examina a forma como o trabalho de Byatt se move produtivamente em debates teóricos aparentemente conflituosos, como as opiniões de F. R. Leavis sobre a leitura e a escrita à luz de abordagens teóricas pós-estruturalistas e feministas; ou o estabelecimento de uma tradição literária feminina separada dentro do cânone literário masculino; ou a resistência pós-modernista à representação realista, para citar apenas alguns dos debates examinados nesta dissertação. Por conseguinte, não é minha intenção sobrepor uma visão teórica específica à minha análise do trabalho de Byatt, mas sim analisar a sua particular relevância à luz das próprias políticas de escrita de Byatt. Proponho o termo crítico “metamorfose simbiótica literária” para investigar o modo como Byatt se posiciona em debates teóricos aparentemente conflituosos, em que examina a validade de cada teoria individual, remodelando-as depois numa poética única de escrita que combina por simbiose as relações criativas e as relações teóricas de um texto com a capacidade de as reorganizar numa prática de escrita que é muito mais do que a soma das diferentes partes que constituem o produto final. O meu termo crítico também é informado pela dialética hegeliana como a investigação crítica de uma tese, necessariamente oposta por uma antítese, sendo a contradição mútua reconciliada num nível mais elevado de verdade por uma terceira proposta, ou síntese. É à luz de todos estes fios interligados que investigo o trabalho criativo e crítico de Byatt

Technicolored

From early sitcoms such as I Love Lucy to contemporary prime-time dramas like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, African Americans on television have too often been asked to portray tired stereotypes of blacks as villains, vixens, victims, and disposable minorities. In Technicolored black feminist critic Ann duCille combines cultural critique with personal reflections on growing up with the new medium of TV to examine how televisual representations of African Americans have changed over the last sixty years. Whether explaining how watching Shirley Temple led her to question her own self-worth or how televisual representation functions as a form of racial profiling, duCille traces the real-life social and political repercussions of the portrayal and presence of African Americans on television. Neither a conventional memoir nor a traditional media study, Technicolored offers one lifelong television watcher's careful, personal, and timely analysis of how television continues to shape notions of race in the American imagination

"Impudent scribblers": place and the unlikely heroines of the interwar years

The central focus of this thesis is the storytelling of place and the place of storytelling. These elements comprise the geoliterary terrains of narrative, the cultural matrix in which texts are sited, produced and received, including the lifeworld of the author. The texts under scrutiny in this research have been written by women during the interwar years of the 20th Century in Britain and Australia. One of the primary aims of the thesis is to explore the geoliterary terrains (including the space known as the middlebrow) of these texts in light of their relative neglect by contemporary critics in comparison with the prominence given to works written by men during this period. Analysis of the texts through the lens of locational feminism (Friedman, 1998, p.5) provides the framework for an interdisciplinary inquiry that draws on geography, feminist literary criticism and new historicism. The examination of the first of the texts, Hostages to Fortune (1933), is centred on the politics of the domestic space and the main character, Catherine’s experiences of domestic life. The chapter dealing with the second novel, A Charmed Circle (1929), while still engaging with the politics of domesticity and the everyday, also pursues the more psychological space of individual and family life as well as locating the interior spaces of the author’s lifeworld. The inquiry broadens out into spiritual and regional landscapes in the probing of The Nine Tailors (1934) which is set in the Fens of East Anglia. Expanding still further into empire, nation and identity, the fourth of the novels, The Invaluable Mystery, set in Australia, is explored in terms of the politics of place. More discussion of these sub-themes ensues as the therapeutic landscape of High Rising (1933) located in an imagined setting, is investigated and the links between the author and the writing of the novel are under scrutiny. The substantive themes of domesticity, home and nation are found to be embedded in these works and in the lifeworlds of their authors. The critical neglect of the texts is located within a set of cultural and material practices that marginalised women writers during this period. This marginalisation is in turn located within a longer historical practice of attempting to silence women’s narratives. Operating beside/against these practices are the imperative of storytelling and women’s ‘will to be known’ through narrative

Acting Social: The Cinema of Mike Nichols

This dissertation argues for the study of director Mike Nichols by elucidating his aesthetic, historical, social, and political importance. He ushered in the turn from "Classical" to "New" Hollywood, and studying his work illuminates unacknowledged similarities and differences in both periods. Furthermore, looking at the cultural significance of his oeuvre deepens our understanding of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, as well as key events in the ensuing five decades of American social history. By analyzing the methods for crafting scenarios that Nichols carried forward to the cinema from his seminal work in radio and theater, I generate new insight into the representation of the interpersonal on-screen, particularly through the lenses of gender and sexuality. There is no scholarship devoted to Nichols's study, and I look what his exclusion from debates in Cinema Studies tells us both about his films and about the dominant approaches and theoretical paradigms used to interpret the cinema, particularly regarding concepts such as character, performance, dialogue, the psychological, the human, and the social

The Scottish context of L.M. Montgomery

This thesis is the first full-length study to assess the impact of the Scottish diaspora in Canada through the writing of Canadian author L.M. Montgomery [1874-1942], Scottish legacies are key to Montgomery's identity, and a pivotal force in her writing.L.M. Montgomery's clan and community genealogies are retraced in a threefold examination of roots. Family legends are analysed with reference to Scottish migration to Prince Edward Island, Montgomery's native province and favoured fictional setting. This thesis aims to provide a more accurate picture of Montgomery's background, and questions some of her assumptions about her Lowland Scots heritage. Integral to each strand is the Canadian context that endorses Montgomery's Scots progenitors as "a chosen people".This legacy becomes the central motif in Montgomery's fiction. This thesis establishes a new critical framework to facilitate the study of this superiority complex, classifying Montgomery's books as either community or clan novels. It argues that Montgomery's first novel, Anne of Green Gables [1908], is not a model for all her subsequent fiction, only those books where community is primary. She diversifies from the "Anne" genre in novels where clan is central, and Scottish family history and folklore increasingly important. This trend is consolidated in the autobiographical "Emily" trilogy, where Scottish roots are expressly an essential component of the heroine's Canadian identity.L.M. Montgomery achieved commercial success partly by attuning her work to existing literary markets. Her antecedents in popularjuvenile literature are significant, but her books and stories also appealed to an adult audience conversant with "local color" writing. This thesis finds parallels between Montgomery's "regional idylls" and those of the popular Scottish authors, J.M. Barrie and Ian Maclaren. Montgomery perceives elements of her Canadian childhood in their books, but adds ironic subtexts when echoing the "Kailyard" world in her fiction.The Scottish milieu in Montgomery's work is neither static nor sentimental. The First World War had an enormous impact on Montgomery personally and on Canadian society. Montgomery's fiction grapples with a new focus on national identity instigated in post-war Canada. In some books, old country antecedents recede, or become contrived. More often, Montgomery imports a darker, more divisive, and less idealistic Scottish heritage, particularly as regards Scottish Presbyterianism.In the inter-war years, Montgomery advocated the preservation of family lore and oral history in order to protect and celebrate Canadian diversity. Scottish customs—Presbyterian faith, folk beliefs, literary and linguistic traditions, clan and community connections—lie at the heart of her Canadian romance and Canadian realism