The Holocaust as Fiction: Derrida’s \u3cem\u3eDemeuere\u3c/em\u3e and the Demjanjuk Trial in Philip Roth’s \u3cem\u3eOperation Shylock\u3c/em\u3e

This essay investigates the representation of juridical testimony in Roth’s “confession,” Operation Shylock. Read through the theoretical lens of Jacques Derrida, specifically in terms of his Demeure, Roth’s novel suggests a new strategy for coping with the Holocaust in literature, wherein writing remains true both to the Holocaust as unspeakable and to the Holocaust as actual historical event

Improvising Chicago

d, 7(1):101-127 (provide link). Reproduced with permission

Improvising Chicago

d, 7(1):101-127 (provide link). Reproduced with permission

Nail a crow to the door

A novel of life in a west coast town and the harsh, magical and sometimes comic predicaments of its characters who try to cope with their traumatic upbringings, disease and alcoholism

Communities of Self: Mavis Gallant’s Linnet Muir Cycle

La série de nouvelles Linnet Muir de Mavis Gallant critique les « significations plus grandes » sensées inclure les histoires individuelles. Cette critique est particulièrement observable dans la description de l’individualité de Linnet, dont les paramètres sont constamment renégociés tout au long du cycle. En articulant les voix de la communauté dans laquelle elle a évolué pendant son enfance et lorsqu’elle était jeune adulte, Linnet suggère que le moi n’est pas construit en opposition face aux pressions sociales, mais qu’il en est indissociable. En même temps, le fait d’articuler les voix de sa communauté lui permet d’échapper à leur logique déterministe, précisément parce que les voix dialoguent continuellement, négociant une réalité sur laquelle elles sont en désaccord, et parce que leur orchestration crée toujours une variation supplémentaire quant à la signification première du passé et du présent. Dans cette variabilité presque infinie, Linnet saisit son libre arbitre et échappe à ce que les autres voudraient qu’elle soit, c’est-à-dire à la signification déterministe à laquelle on aimerait la subordonner, elle et son histoire. Au lieu de ce déterminisme, Gallant propose un pluralisme radical, une « communauté de moi ». Elle adapte la série de nouvelles à une vision politique dans laquelle le libre arbitre du sujet s’accomplit dans et à travers la communauté oppressante

Towards a definition of dirty realism

This thesis develops and refines a term used initially by Bill Buford to refer to works of contemporary realism. Dirty realism characterises a strain of realism first appearing in American and Canadian writing during the 1960s and increasing in prominence through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. The study focuses on the scholarship surrounding both the term and the works of particular authors, and applies the theories of Fredric Jameson and Michel de Certeau to develop a basic critical vocabulary for engaging the fiction and poetry of Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Mark Anthony Jarman, as well as other writers treated with less intensity, such as David Adams Richards, Helen Potrebenko, Al Purdy, and Bobbie Anne Mason. In particular, the dissertation attempts to develop a critical terminology through which to discuss dirty realist texts. The most prominent of such terms, the "hypocrisy aesthetic," refers to dirty realism's aesthetic of contradiction, discursive variance, and offsetting of theory against practice. The chapters of the dissertation deal with the emergence of the hypocrisy aesthetic through a study of literary genealogy, history, and theory. The second chapter, "Dirty Realism: Genealogy," traces the development of major currents in twentieth-century American realism, particularly naturalism. Arguing for dirty realism as a variant of naturalism, the chapter traces the transmission of ideas concerning dialectics, determinism, and commodity production from Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, through James T. Farrell and John Steinbeck and ending with an extensive discussion of Charles Bukowski's Factotum. The third chapter, "Dirty Realism: History," addresses the impact of the Cold War on the development of dirty realism. Referring to major critics on the period, this section of the dissertation follows the development of hypocrisy as a form of discourse eventuated by Cold War contradictions, particularly between that of democratic freedoms proclaimed abroad and the atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia on the domestic scene (as—in the USA—in the HUAC hearings chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy).Arts, Faculty ofEnglish, Department ofGraduat

Improvising Chicago

Aldo Rossi's The Architecture of the City articulates how civic space intersects with collective agency: "One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places [. . .] The collective memory participates in the actual transformation of space in the works of the collective, a transformation that is always conditioned by whatever material realities oppose it" (130). Rossi's contention—that the development, or "transformation," of urban space is accomplished by a collective deploying memory in its struggle with material reality—is the scene of Stuart Dybek's southside Chicago in, The Coast of Chicago. Where this short story cycle deals with musical improvisation it dramatizes Rossi's contention by showing how memory not only resists "material realities"—in this case the demolition of southside neighborhoods initiated by Mayor Daley—and not only preserves ethnicity—especially the Polish and Chicano diasporas Dybek writes about—but also enables what Thomas S. Gladsky has called "a trans-ethnic urban America [. . .] a diverse cultural landscape where ethnicity transcends national origins but remains vital" (117). Dybek's ethnic self is a processual subjectivity, improvisatory rather than definitive, "based [less] on national origins [than] on a shared sense of ethnicity as a condition of Americanness" (Gladsky 115). In the story "Blight" characters inhabit a neighborhood where "the city was tearing down buildings for urban renewal and tearing up streets for a new expressway, and everywhere one looked there were signs in front of the rubble reading: sorry for the inconvenience / another improvement / for a greater Chicago / Richard J. Daley, Mayor" (44). Yet it is this demolition of monuments, this assault on what Rossi calls "the Locus" ("a relationship between a [. . .] specific location and the buildings that are in it" 103), this demonstration of the materiality of civic space that allows the characters to reawaken to the transformative potential of community: "It was the route we usually took to the viaduct, but since blight had been declared we were trying to see our surroundings from a new perspective" (45). Awakening to "new perspectives" as a result of civic "improvement" Dybek's characters cast off a determinate subjectivity and realize the action of the collective in the determination of civic reality. When the characters go to the viaduct off Douglas Park and begin improvising a "blues" by "slamming an aerial or board or chain off the girders, making the echoes collide and ring [. . .] clonk[ing] empty bottles and beer cans [. . .] shouting and screaming like [. . .] Howlin' Wolf" (48) they are joined by "a train [. . .] booming overhead like part of the song" (48)and by "a gang of black kids" at the other end of the viaduct who "stood harmonizing from bass through falsetto just like the Coasters, so sweetly that though at first [the characters] tried outshouting them, [they] finally shut up and listened, except for Pepper keeping the beat" (48). The fragments of the city are used to enable collectivity, to remember what the city is for. The attempt of civic authority to wrest memory from its inhabitants by making it impermanent, fragmentary, demolished, is precisely what restores agency by giving way to a subjectivity that is the scene of salvage. In this way communities become aware of their ability to define landscape, to alter "perspective" and take possession of space, to regard ethnicity as a common instrument, as if out of material destruction it might be possible to make of memory something more powerful than memorization, defying institutional permanence—civic or ethnic—for a community that is elastic, responsive, aware of its relationships with and within the spaces it inhabits

Sam Shepard’s ‘Body’ of Tragedy

Sam Shepard’s play, A Particle of Dread (The Oedipus Variations), is haunted by a biological inevitability pointing to Shepard’s own death from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in 2017, one characterized by precisely the progressive degeneration of muscles and mobility, ultimately leading to paralysis, that guides the form of his last published play