Seeing Battle, Knowing War: Feminist Re-Visioning in Hortensia Papadat-Bengesçu’s “The Man Whose Heart They Could See”

As an exploration of the themes of disillusionment and the failure of language, Romanian writer Hortensia Papadat-Bengesçu’s “The Man Whose Heart They Could See” would seem to share much with better-known men’s writing on the war such as Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms or Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu: Journal d’une Escouade. But a careful reading of the text reveals some crucial differences from these works. Treating the subject of war not in terms of an easily definable “scene of battle” or “war front” but instead as a deeply entrenched cultural logic in which varied aspects of society are both affected and, in an important sense, complicit, “The Man Whose Heart They Could See” mounts a critique of language far more radical and modernist than that found in most war literature, one which explores the extent to which questions of historical memory are inextricably bound up with issues of gender and power

Seeing Battle, Knowing War: Feminist Re-Visioning in Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu’s The Man Whose Heart They Could See

Compares themes of disillusionment and the inadequacy of language in Papadat-Bengescu’s war story to similar themes in A Farewell to Arms

Bad pennies and dead presidents: Money in modern American drama

This dissertation compares the treatment of money in a range of American plays from the Great Depression to the early twenty-first century. In these works money is a site of anxieties regarding the relation of signs to the real: a monstrous substance that seems to breed itself from itself; a dangerous abstraction that claims for itself a hard reality, transforming lived reality into an abstraction. At the same time, money\u27s self-generating properties have made it a serviceable metaphor for the American ideal of self-making ; money\u27s ability to exchange means for ends, abstract for concrete, representation for real, has made it an emblem of our postmodern condition. Money has been conceived as a malevolent force robbing us of our natural relation to the world and to ourselves, and as an empowering one with which me way remake this relation. ^ This ambivalence about money constitutes an important animating tension of American drama. Furthermore, anxieties surrounding money resemble in important ways anxieties surrounding theatre, and the plays\u27 treatment of money reveals interesting tensions between a persistent American dramatic realism and naturalism, and a philosophical and aesthetic postmodernism. Chapter one provides a brief introduction to some of the history of thinking about money, and looks specifically at concerns over hard and soft currencies from the nineteenth century to the present. Chapter two reads Sidney Kingsley\u27s Dead End (1933) as profoundly ambivalent in its association of money with both self-making and self-immolation, as well as with the construction and destruction of the American family. Chapter three focuses on Miller\u27s Death of a Salesman (1949), seeing in the salesman\u27s search for a hard value the fear of an absence of value in mid-century American life. Chapter four finds in David Mamet\u27s American Buffalo (1979) an attempt to naturalize economic relations between men by projecting money\u27s monstrous tendencies onto women. Chapter five looks at Suzan-Lori Parks\u27s Topdog/Underdog (2001), arguing that the naturalism of Parks\u27s treatment of money complicates the deceptively simple postmodern notion of identity as performative. In an afterward I note patterns of symbols shared by the plays and tie their ambivalence toward money to the American preoccupation with authenticity.