Rivkah Zim
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691161808
- eISBN:
- 9781400852093
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691161808.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter presents a reading of Marie-Jeanne Roland's Memoirs (1793) and Anne Frank's The Diary and Tales from the Secret Annexe (1942–44). Both writers wrote memorial narratives to preserve ...
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This chapter presents a reading of Marie-Jeanne Roland's Memoirs (1793) and Anne Frank's The Diary and Tales from the Secret Annexe (1942–44). Both writers wrote memorial narratives to preserve details of their lives because they believed that writing about their ideas, experiences, and feelings would help to sustain them in the exceptional circumstances of confinement. Both writers also became popular heroines: their prison writings have been continuously in print since shortly after their deaths. Yet their personal memoirs of different kinds have been read and valued as historic witness accounts of wider, catastrophic events: the French Revolution and the Holocaust. Both writers were conscious of their roles as historic witnesses, but the chapter seeks to refocus attention on their ideas of themselves as writers and the primary functions of their texts as literary testimony to unique personal identities rather than the historic victims of terror they came to represent for later readers.Less
This chapter presents a reading of Marie-Jeanne Roland's Memoirs (1793) and Anne Frank's The Diary and Tales from the Secret Annexe (1942–44). Both writers wrote memorial narratives to preserve details of their lives because they believed that writing about their ideas, experiences, and feelings would help to sustain them in the exceptional circumstances of confinement. Both writers also became popular heroines: their prison writings have been continuously in print since shortly after their deaths. Yet their personal memoirs of different kinds have been read and valued as historic witness accounts of wider, catastrophic events: the French Revolution and the Holocaust. Both writers were conscious of their roles as historic witnesses, but the chapter seeks to refocus attention on their ideas of themselves as writers and the primary functions of their texts as literary testimony to unique personal identities rather than the historic victims of terror they came to represent for later readers.
Susan Tiefenbrun
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195385779
- eISBN:
- 9780199776061
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195385779.003.011
- Subject:
- Law, Public International Law
Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha captures the duality of the geisha who is both revered as an artist and reviled as a sex slave. At its worst, the geisha tradition involves force, fraud, ...
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Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha captures the duality of the geisha who is both revered as an artist and reviled as a sex slave. At its worst, the geisha tradition involves force, fraud, deception, and the horrifying practice of selling one's own children into slavery for purposes of sexual exploitation. In striving for historical accuracy and narrative verisimilitude, Golden obtains an intimate interview with a real geisha named Mineko Iwasaki. The fairy-tale quality of the novel, its unusual narrative style, and its poetic prose, created an instant literary success for Arthur Golden. However, four years after its publication in 1997, Iwasaki shocked the literary world by filing a lawsuit against Arthur Golden and his publishers claiming breach of a confidentiality agreement, quantum meruit, unjust enrichment, copyright infringement, defamation of character, misappropriation of property, and violation of her rights to privacy and publicity. This chapter tries to answer the following two questions about the cultural tradition of the geisha: first, is the geisha tradition (as described by Golden in his fictional biography) a variant of sex trafficking and sexual slavery, which despite possible cultural justifications should be abolished by law? Second, did Iwasaki's lawsuit have any legal merit? To answer these questions, this study will proceed in accordance with structuralist and post-structuralist literary critical methods by looking first at the text itself and then its context, subtext, and post-text to explain the plaintiff's pre-text for suing. It analyzes the narrative structures and style of the text; the legal and historic context of the novel; the legal issues hidden in the subtext (which include sex trafficking, feminist legal theory, and the role of cultural relativism as a justification for the geisha tradition); the post-text (which are the merits, if any, of Iwasaki's legal claims in the Complaint she filed four years after the publication of the fictional biography); and finally, the big issue, the pre-text, or why the real geisha sued Arthur Golden and his publishers.Less
Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha captures the duality of the geisha who is both revered as an artist and reviled as a sex slave. At its worst, the geisha tradition involves force, fraud, deception, and the horrifying practice of selling one's own children into slavery for purposes of sexual exploitation. In striving for historical accuracy and narrative verisimilitude, Golden obtains an intimate interview with a real geisha named Mineko Iwasaki. The fairy-tale quality of the novel, its unusual narrative style, and its poetic prose, created an instant literary success for Arthur Golden. However, four years after its publication in 1997, Iwasaki shocked the literary world by filing a lawsuit against Arthur Golden and his publishers claiming breach of a confidentiality agreement, quantum meruit, unjust enrichment, copyright infringement, defamation of character, misappropriation of property, and violation of her rights to privacy and publicity. This chapter tries to answer the following two questions about the cultural tradition of the geisha: first, is the geisha tradition (as described by Golden in his fictional biography) a variant of sex trafficking and sexual slavery, which despite possible cultural justifications should be abolished by law? Second, did Iwasaki's lawsuit have any legal merit? To answer these questions, this study will proceed in accordance with structuralist and post-structuralist literary critical methods by looking first at the text itself and then its context, subtext, and post-text to explain the plaintiff's pre-text for suing. It analyzes the narrative structures and style of the text; the legal and historic context of the novel; the legal issues hidden in the subtext (which include sex trafficking, feminist legal theory, and the role of cultural relativism as a justification for the geisha tradition); the post-text (which are the merits, if any, of Iwasaki's legal claims in the Complaint she filed four years after the publication of the fictional biography); and finally, the big issue, the pre-text, or why the real geisha sued Arthur Golden and his publishers.
NOëL O’SULLIVAN
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197264355
- eISBN:
- 9780191734052
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264355.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This lecture presents the text of the speech about visions of European unity since 1945 delivered by the author at the 2007 Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture held at the British Academy. It discusses ...
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This lecture presents the text of the speech about visions of European unity since 1945 delivered by the author at the 2007 Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture held at the British Academy. It discusses Jean Monnet's Memoirs, wherein he expressed the hope for a United States of Europe, and comments on the French and Dutch rejection of the draft Constitutional Treaty of the European Constitution in 2005.Less
This lecture presents the text of the speech about visions of European unity since 1945 delivered by the author at the 2007 Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture held at the British Academy. It discusses Jean Monnet's Memoirs, wherein he expressed the hope for a United States of Europe, and comments on the French and Dutch rejection of the draft Constitutional Treaty of the European Constitution in 2005.
Christine E. Hallett
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781784992521
- eISBN:
- 9781526104342
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992521.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
The First World War was the first ‘total war’. Its industrial weaponry damaged millions of men, and drove whole armies underground into dangerously unhealthy trenches. Many were killed. Others ...
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The First World War was the first ‘total war’. Its industrial weaponry damaged millions of men, and drove whole armies underground into dangerously unhealthy trenches. Many were killed. Others suffered from massive, life-threatening injuries; wound infections such as gas gangrene and tetanus; exposure to extremes of temperature; emotional trauma; and systemic disease. Tens of thousands of women volunteered to serve as nurses to alleviate their suffering. Some were fully-trained professionals; others had minimal preparation, and served as volunteer-nurses. Their motivations were a combination of compassion, patriotism, professional pride and a desire for engagement in the ‘great enterprise’ of war. The war led to an outpouring of war-memoirs, produced mostly by soldier-writers whose works came to be seen as a ‘literary canon’ of war-writing. But nurses had offered immediate and long-term care, life-saving expertise, and comfort to the war’s wounded, and their experiences had given them a perspective on industrial warfare which was unique. Until recently, their contributions, both to the saving of lives and to our understanding of warfare have remained largely hidden from view. ‘Nurse Writers of the Great War’ examines these nurses’ memoirs and explores the insights they offer into the nature of nursing and the impact of warfare. The book combines close biographical research with textual analysis, in order to offer an understanding of both nurses’ wartime experiences and the ways in which their lives and backgrounds contributed to the style and content of their writing.Less
The First World War was the first ‘total war’. Its industrial weaponry damaged millions of men, and drove whole armies underground into dangerously unhealthy trenches. Many were killed. Others suffered from massive, life-threatening injuries; wound infections such as gas gangrene and tetanus; exposure to extremes of temperature; emotional trauma; and systemic disease. Tens of thousands of women volunteered to serve as nurses to alleviate their suffering. Some were fully-trained professionals; others had minimal preparation, and served as volunteer-nurses. Their motivations were a combination of compassion, patriotism, professional pride and a desire for engagement in the ‘great enterprise’ of war. The war led to an outpouring of war-memoirs, produced mostly by soldier-writers whose works came to be seen as a ‘literary canon’ of war-writing. But nurses had offered immediate and long-term care, life-saving expertise, and comfort to the war’s wounded, and their experiences had given them a perspective on industrial warfare which was unique. Until recently, their contributions, both to the saving of lives and to our understanding of warfare have remained largely hidden from view. ‘Nurse Writers of the Great War’ examines these nurses’ memoirs and explores the insights they offer into the nature of nursing and the impact of warfare. The book combines close biographical research with textual analysis, in order to offer an understanding of both nurses’ wartime experiences and the ways in which their lives and backgrounds contributed to the style and content of their writing.
Andrew T. McDonald and Verlaine Stoner McDonald
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813176079
- eISBN:
- 9780813176109
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813176079.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Rusch returned to Japan to find destruction, despair, and starvation everywhere. Rusch began his work for the Civil Intelligence Section in Tokyo, uncovering evidence for the International Military ...
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Rusch returned to Japan to find destruction, despair, and starvation everywhere. Rusch began his work for the Civil Intelligence Section in Tokyo, uncovering evidence for the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE). Rusch hoped that the Allies would bring justice to postwar Japan, but the Americans had an agenda. As part of the effort to facilitate a peaceful occupation, Rusch secured evidence supportive of American policy, absolving Emperor Hirohito of blame for the Pacific War. Rusch was instrumental in acquiring the Saionji-Harada Memoirs, volumes of notes cataloguing the imperial family’s resistance to militarism. Rusch also recovered evidence of an international Communist conspiracy in Japan, a development that greatly enhanced his standing among his anti-Communist superiors. Rusch soon discovered the level of compromise and corruption in the Occupation government as he saw innocent Japanese being purged while some war criminals, such as the biological warfare mastermind Shiro Ishii, received immunity. During this time, Rusch met a former kamikaze pilot, Ryo Natori, a teenager he hired as a houseboy. Natori became a surrogate son and was a key figure in the rest of Rusch’s life. Rusch also used his considerable power to punish those who sold Seisen-Ryo and stripped Rikkyo University of its Christian identity.Less
Rusch returned to Japan to find destruction, despair, and starvation everywhere. Rusch began his work for the Civil Intelligence Section in Tokyo, uncovering evidence for the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE). Rusch hoped that the Allies would bring justice to postwar Japan, but the Americans had an agenda. As part of the effort to facilitate a peaceful occupation, Rusch secured evidence supportive of American policy, absolving Emperor Hirohito of blame for the Pacific War. Rusch was instrumental in acquiring the Saionji-Harada Memoirs, volumes of notes cataloguing the imperial family’s resistance to militarism. Rusch also recovered evidence of an international Communist conspiracy in Japan, a development that greatly enhanced his standing among his anti-Communist superiors. Rusch soon discovered the level of compromise and corruption in the Occupation government as he saw innocent Japanese being purged while some war criminals, such as the biological warfare mastermind Shiro Ishii, received immunity. During this time, Rusch met a former kamikaze pilot, Ryo Natori, a teenager he hired as a houseboy. Natori became a surrogate son and was a key figure in the rest of Rusch’s life. Rusch also used his considerable power to punish those who sold Seisen-Ryo and stripped Rikkyo University of its Christian identity.
Mary Jacobus
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184348
- eISBN:
- 9780191674211
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184348.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Freud familiarizes his readers with the notion that telepathy may become a valid communication form. He also suggests that individuals may have initially utilized telepathy as the original, archaic ...
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Freud familiarizes his readers with the notion that telepathy may become a valid communication form. He also suggests that individuals may have initially utilized telepathy as the original, archaic communication method. His concept was probably based on several earlier notions regarding one's ability to directly communicate with others. Also, it addresses psychoanalytic concepts about unconscious communication and unconscious intersubjective exchanges between the text and its readers. Autobiographical memoirs and epistolary fiction play no small part in creating subjectivity as these ideas connect together the origins of the eighteenth-century novel. This chapter utilizes Mary Hay's Memoirs of Emma Courtney as a part of the Enlightenment project in the studying of the human mind. Particular focus is drawn to an ideal communication form referred to as the ‘vehicular state’.Less
Freud familiarizes his readers with the notion that telepathy may become a valid communication form. He also suggests that individuals may have initially utilized telepathy as the original, archaic communication method. His concept was probably based on several earlier notions regarding one's ability to directly communicate with others. Also, it addresses psychoanalytic concepts about unconscious communication and unconscious intersubjective exchanges between the text and its readers. Autobiographical memoirs and epistolary fiction play no small part in creating subjectivity as these ideas connect together the origins of the eighteenth-century novel. This chapter utilizes Mary Hay's Memoirs of Emma Courtney as a part of the Enlightenment project in the studying of the human mind. Particular focus is drawn to an ideal communication form referred to as the ‘vehicular state’.
Erik Ching
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469628660
- eISBN:
- 9781469628684
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469628660.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
El Salvador's civil war began in 1980 and ended twelve bloody years later. It saw extreme violence on both sides, including the terrorizing and targeting of civilians by death squads, recruitment of ...
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El Salvador's civil war began in 1980 and ended twelve bloody years later. It saw extreme violence on both sides, including the terrorizing and targeting of civilians by death squads, recruitment of child soldiers, and the death and disappearance of more than 75,000 people. Examining El Salvador's vibrant life-story literature written in the aftermath of this terrible conflict—including memoirs and testimonials—Erik Ching seeks to understand how the war has come to be remembered and rebattled by Salvadorans and what that means for their society today. Ching identifies four memory communities that dominate national post-war views: civilian elites, military officers, guerrilla commanders, and working class and poor testimonialists. Pushing distinct and divergent stories, these groups are today engaged in what Ching terms a "narrative battle" for control over the memory of the war. Their ongoing publications in the marketplace of ideas tend to direct Salvadorans' attempts to negotiate the war’s meaning and legacy, and Ching suggests that a more open, coordinated reconciliation process is needed in this post-conflict society. In the meantime, El Salvador, fractured by conflicting interpretations of its national trauma, is hindered in dealing with the immediate problems posed by the nexus of neoliberalism, gang violence, and outmigration.Less
El Salvador's civil war began in 1980 and ended twelve bloody years later. It saw extreme violence on both sides, including the terrorizing and targeting of civilians by death squads, recruitment of child soldiers, and the death and disappearance of more than 75,000 people. Examining El Salvador's vibrant life-story literature written in the aftermath of this terrible conflict—including memoirs and testimonials—Erik Ching seeks to understand how the war has come to be remembered and rebattled by Salvadorans and what that means for their society today. Ching identifies four memory communities that dominate national post-war views: civilian elites, military officers, guerrilla commanders, and working class and poor testimonialists. Pushing distinct and divergent stories, these groups are today engaged in what Ching terms a "narrative battle" for control over the memory of the war. Their ongoing publications in the marketplace of ideas tend to direct Salvadorans' attempts to negotiate the war’s meaning and legacy, and Ching suggests that a more open, coordinated reconciliation process is needed in this post-conflict society. In the meantime, El Salvador, fractured by conflicting interpretations of its national trauma, is hindered in dealing with the immediate problems posed by the nexus of neoliberalism, gang violence, and outmigration.
Karen Junod
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199597000
- eISBN:
- 9780191725357
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199597000.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Chapter 3 argues that Beckford's Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780) should be regarded as an idiosyncratic response to the connoisseurial discourse elaborated in the eighteenth and ...
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Chapter 3 argues that Beckford's Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780) should be regarded as an idiosyncratic response to the connoisseurial discourse elaborated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beckford's knowledge of art and art theory, combined with his talents as a satirical novelist, produced a work which was not only funny but also theoretically insightful. Beckford's work directly responded to, and was inspired by, other contemporary writing on art and artists. Indeed, the Memoirs was closely related to other artistic satires produced in England, by writers such as Henry Bate Dudley, Peter Pindar, and Anthony Pasquin. Beckford's text also contains certain tropes and topoi – already present in Walpole's Anecdotes – which participated in constructing specific artistic individualities, some of which would re-emerge later in the lives of historical British painters.Less
Chapter 3 argues that Beckford's Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780) should be regarded as an idiosyncratic response to the connoisseurial discourse elaborated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beckford's knowledge of art and art theory, combined with his talents as a satirical novelist, produced a work which was not only funny but also theoretically insightful. Beckford's work directly responded to, and was inspired by, other contemporary writing on art and artists. Indeed, the Memoirs was closely related to other artistic satires produced in England, by writers such as Henry Bate Dudley, Peter Pindar, and Anthony Pasquin. Beckford's text also contains certain tropes and topoi – already present in Walpole's Anecdotes – which participated in constructing specific artistic individualities, some of which would re-emerge later in the lives of historical British painters.
Karen Junod
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199597000
- eISBN:
- 9780191725357
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199597000.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter discusses Amelia Opie's Memoir of her husband, the painter John Opie. It argues that Opie's Memoir marks a pivotal transition in the biographical writing of artists' lives in Britain. ...
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This chapter discusses Amelia Opie's Memoir of her husband, the painter John Opie. It argues that Opie's Memoir marks a pivotal transition in the biographical writing of artists' lives in Britain. Unlike most other lives of artists published in Britain in the eighteenth century, Opie's Memoir portrayed her subject in a private setting. The domestic environment in which Amelia Opie set her biography marked a sharp contrast with the public and often cosmopolitan spheres in which earlier lives of painters had been inscribed. The private world in which Amelia chose to present her husband was not without its tensions, however. This chapter shows that the dynamic between biographer and subject was complicated by gendered issues, and especially by the biographer's conflicting duty and desire to pay tribute to the life of her spouse, while at the same time implicitly promoting her own work and career as a successful novelist.Less
This chapter discusses Amelia Opie's Memoir of her husband, the painter John Opie. It argues that Opie's Memoir marks a pivotal transition in the biographical writing of artists' lives in Britain. Unlike most other lives of artists published in Britain in the eighteenth century, Opie's Memoir portrayed her subject in a private setting. The domestic environment in which Amelia Opie set her biography marked a sharp contrast with the public and often cosmopolitan spheres in which earlier lives of painters had been inscribed. The private world in which Amelia chose to present her husband was not without its tensions, however. This chapter shows that the dynamic between biographer and subject was complicated by gendered issues, and especially by the biographer's conflicting duty and desire to pay tribute to the life of her spouse, while at the same time implicitly promoting her own work and career as a successful novelist.
Charlotte Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780198704836
- eISBN:
- 9780191789458
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198704836.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
Edward Gibbon’s presentation of character in both the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and in his posthumously published Memoirs demonstrates a prevailing interest in the values of ...
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Edward Gibbon’s presentation of character in both the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and in his posthumously published Memoirs demonstrates a prevailing interest in the values of transcendent heroism and individual liberty, but also an insistent awareness of the dangers these values pose to coherence and narrative order. In this study, Dr Roberts demonstrates how these dynamics also inform the ‘character’ of the Decline and Fall: in which ironic difference confronts enervating uniformity; oddity counters specious lucidity, and revision combats repetition. Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History explores the Decline and Fall as a work of scholarship and of literature, tracing both its expansive outline and its expressive details. A close examination of each of the three instalments of Gibbon’s history reveals an intimate relationship between the style of Gibbon’s narrative and the overall shape of his historiographical composition. The constant interplay between the particular details of composition and the larger patterns of argument and narrative informs every aspect of Gibbon’s work: from his reception of established and innovative historiographical conventions to the expression of his narrative voice. Through a combination of close reading and larger literary and scholarly analysis, Dr Roberts conveys a sense of the Decline and Fall as a work more complex and conflicted, in its tone and structure, than has been appreciated by previous scholars, without losing sight of the grand contours of Gibbon’s superlative achievement.Less
Edward Gibbon’s presentation of character in both the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and in his posthumously published Memoirs demonstrates a prevailing interest in the values of transcendent heroism and individual liberty, but also an insistent awareness of the dangers these values pose to coherence and narrative order. In this study, Dr Roberts demonstrates how these dynamics also inform the ‘character’ of the Decline and Fall: in which ironic difference confronts enervating uniformity; oddity counters specious lucidity, and revision combats repetition. Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History explores the Decline and Fall as a work of scholarship and of literature, tracing both its expansive outline and its expressive details. A close examination of each of the three instalments of Gibbon’s history reveals an intimate relationship between the style of Gibbon’s narrative and the overall shape of his historiographical composition. The constant interplay between the particular details of composition and the larger patterns of argument and narrative informs every aspect of Gibbon’s work: from his reception of established and innovative historiographical conventions to the expression of his narrative voice. Through a combination of close reading and larger literary and scholarly analysis, Dr Roberts conveys a sense of the Decline and Fall as a work more complex and conflicted, in its tone and structure, than has been appreciated by previous scholars, without losing sight of the grand contours of Gibbon’s superlative achievement.
Geoffrey R. Stone
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199812042
- eISBN:
- 9780199315888
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199812042.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Novels of the eighteenth century often treat sexuality in highly explicit terms, by the standards even of our own time, and certainly by Victorian standards. This chapter addresses the topic of ...
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Novels of the eighteenth century often treat sexuality in highly explicit terms, by the standards even of our own time, and certainly by Victorian standards. This chapter addresses the topic of sexual explicitness, looking at the role of law in regulating artistic expression in our period. It argues that we tend today to think of a legal doctrine of obscenity as quite natural, regardless of whether we like the doctrine as it exists. However, the doctrine did not exist at all until the eighteenth century and did not have any real bite in English law until the publication of John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in 1748. The chapter traces the origins of the obscenity doctrine in English law in order to show, among other things, that it was not a meaningful part of either English or American law until well after the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was enacted. Looking at the nonregulation of highly explicit literature by law informs us about our legal concepts, past and present.Less
Novels of the eighteenth century often treat sexuality in highly explicit terms, by the standards even of our own time, and certainly by Victorian standards. This chapter addresses the topic of sexual explicitness, looking at the role of law in regulating artistic expression in our period. It argues that we tend today to think of a legal doctrine of obscenity as quite natural, regardless of whether we like the doctrine as it exists. However, the doctrine did not exist at all until the eighteenth century and did not have any real bite in English law until the publication of John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in 1748. The chapter traces the origins of the obscenity doctrine in English law in order to show, among other things, that it was not a meaningful part of either English or American law until well after the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was enacted. Looking at the nonregulation of highly explicit literature by law informs us about our legal concepts, past and present.
Jay Geller
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823233618
- eISBN:
- 9780823241781
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233618.003.0009
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter situates Judge Daniel Paul Schreber's vision of the non-Jewish unmanned Wandering Jew (or “Eternal Jew”; der ewige Jude) in relation to contemporaneous constructions of the Wandering Jew ...
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This chapter situates Judge Daniel Paul Schreber's vision of the non-Jewish unmanned Wandering Jew (or “Eternal Jew”; der ewige Jude) in relation to contemporaneous constructions of the Wandering Jew as soteriological figure and antisemitic stereotype. Specifically, it undertakes analyses of Wolfgang Kirchbach's play The Last Men, Henri Meige's psychiatric monograph The Wandering Jew in the Salpêtrière, and Oskar Panizza's short narrative “The Operated Jew.” The chapter then presents Schreber's own gendered and ethnic characterization of the “Eternal Jew” and demonstrates his overlooked identification with that figure in his Memoirs of My Mental Illness. It explores the conditions for Schreber's identification by placing it in the context of devirilizing representations of Jewish men, his family ties to the Leipzig's Jewish community, and to his apparent syphilophobia.Less
This chapter situates Judge Daniel Paul Schreber's vision of the non-Jewish unmanned Wandering Jew (or “Eternal Jew”; der ewige Jude) in relation to contemporaneous constructions of the Wandering Jew as soteriological figure and antisemitic stereotype. Specifically, it undertakes analyses of Wolfgang Kirchbach's play The Last Men, Henri Meige's psychiatric monograph The Wandering Jew in the Salpêtrière, and Oskar Panizza's short narrative “The Operated Jew.” The chapter then presents Schreber's own gendered and ethnic characterization of the “Eternal Jew” and demonstrates his overlooked identification with that figure in his Memoirs of My Mental Illness. It explores the conditions for Schreber's identification by placing it in the context of devirilizing representations of Jewish men, his family ties to the Leipzig's Jewish community, and to his apparent syphilophobia.
Michael K. Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617039287
- eISBN:
- 9781626740013
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039287.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos undertakes an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of select texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for ...
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Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos undertakes an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of select texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for both an in-depth analysis of individual texts and a discussion of material often left out or under-represented in studies focused only on traditional literary material: heretofore unexamined writing by Rose Gordon, who wrote for local western publications rather than for a national audience; memoirs and letters of musicians, performers, and singers (such as W. C. Handy) who lived in or wrote about touring the American West; Percival Everett’s fiction addressing contemporary black western experience; the novels and films of Oscar Micheaux; black-cast westerns starring Herb Jeffries; largely unappreciated and unexamined episodes from the “golden age of western television” that feature African American actors; film and television westerns that use science fiction settings to imagine a “post-racial” or “post-soul” frontier. Despite recent interest in the history of the African American West, we know very little about how the African American past in the West has been depicted in a full range of imaginative forms. Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos takes us another step further in the journey of discovering how the African American West has been experienced, imagined, and performed.Less
Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos undertakes an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of select texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for both an in-depth analysis of individual texts and a discussion of material often left out or under-represented in studies focused only on traditional literary material: heretofore unexamined writing by Rose Gordon, who wrote for local western publications rather than for a national audience; memoirs and letters of musicians, performers, and singers (such as W. C. Handy) who lived in or wrote about touring the American West; Percival Everett’s fiction addressing contemporary black western experience; the novels and films of Oscar Micheaux; black-cast westerns starring Herb Jeffries; largely unappreciated and unexamined episodes from the “golden age of western television” that feature African American actors; film and television westerns that use science fiction settings to imagine a “post-racial” or “post-soul” frontier. Despite recent interest in the history of the African American West, we know very little about how the African American past in the West has been depicted in a full range of imaginative forms. Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos takes us another step further in the journey of discovering how the African American West has been experienced, imagined, and performed.
Leonard Lawlor
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823226535
- eISBN:
- 9780823235742
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823226535.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
This chapter proposes that in Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida is engaged in a deconstruction of Christianity. The deconstruction takes place through the self-portrait, which is ...
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This chapter proposes that in Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida is engaged in a deconstruction of Christianity. The deconstruction takes place through the self-portrait, which is a figure of auto-affection. But this figure of auto-affection seems to center on one painting: Jan Provost's Sacred Allegory. The central point in what Derrida writes about this painting is that the eye has nothing to do with sight but with weeping, with tears. What is important about tears is that they are ex-orbitant, they pass over the limit of the ocular globe. Tears of mourning for a departed lover, as they run down the face, draw lines, tracings, or figures, whose forms, we might say, proclaim, like Scripture (of course, écriture, in French), an other still to come, becoming thereby tears of joy. At the end of Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida wonders whether animals can cry too. And if they can cry, do they not also, like us, wait for an other still to come, do they not also wait for the revelation? In any case, when we think about crying, we must think of the eye as a source-point, as an origin.Less
This chapter proposes that in Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida is engaged in a deconstruction of Christianity. The deconstruction takes place through the self-portrait, which is a figure of auto-affection. But this figure of auto-affection seems to center on one painting: Jan Provost's Sacred Allegory. The central point in what Derrida writes about this painting is that the eye has nothing to do with sight but with weeping, with tears. What is important about tears is that they are ex-orbitant, they pass over the limit of the ocular globe. Tears of mourning for a departed lover, as they run down the face, draw lines, tracings, or figures, whose forms, we might say, proclaim, like Scripture (of course, écriture, in French), an other still to come, becoming thereby tears of joy. At the end of Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida wonders whether animals can cry too. And if they can cry, do they not also, like us, wait for an other still to come, do they not also wait for the revelation? In any case, when we think about crying, we must think of the eye as a source-point, as an origin.
Susan Watkins
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074813
- eISBN:
- 9781781703274
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074813.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
What must strike any reader of Doris Lessing's 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, is the extent to which its protagonist, AnnaWulf, has been affected by the experience of loss. Anna's attempt to ...
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What must strike any reader of Doris Lessing's 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, is the extent to which its protagonist, AnnaWulf, has been affected by the experience of loss. Anna's attempt to convince herself that her pain and that of other women like her represents ‘not much loss’ is belied by the experience of reading the entire novel and by Lessing's continuing preoccupation with the idea of loss in her later novels, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974). This chapter explores how, in her work in the 1960s and the early 1970s, Lessing rewrites the experience of loss as potentially creative, productive and transformative. In her vision of what the chapter calls a ‘melancholy cosmopolitanism’, Lessing challenges the closed-off, paranoid legacy of the Cold War in the 1950s. In Memoirs and Briefing, she further develops the distinction between the claustrophobic, nostalgic relation to loss that is characteristic of mourning and the creative work of melancholia.Less
What must strike any reader of Doris Lessing's 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, is the extent to which its protagonist, AnnaWulf, has been affected by the experience of loss. Anna's attempt to convince herself that her pain and that of other women like her represents ‘not much loss’ is belied by the experience of reading the entire novel and by Lessing's continuing preoccupation with the idea of loss in her later novels, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974). This chapter explores how, in her work in the 1960s and the early 1970s, Lessing rewrites the experience of loss as potentially creative, productive and transformative. In her vision of what the chapter calls a ‘melancholy cosmopolitanism’, Lessing challenges the closed-off, paranoid legacy of the Cold War in the 1950s. In Memoirs and Briefing, she further develops the distinction between the claustrophobic, nostalgic relation to loss that is characteristic of mourning and the creative work of melancholia.
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469640921
- eISBN:
- 9781469640945
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469640921.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter looks to overlapping discussions of American economic health and growth to present a complex story about the circulation of currency as well as the circulation of late-eighteenth century ...
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This chapter looks to overlapping discussions of American economic health and growth to present a complex story about the circulation of currency as well as the circulation of late-eighteenth century conceptions of American personhood in the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Stephen Burroughs. These imaginative accounts of counterfeiting dramatize the intimate bonds of normative conceptions of citizenship and national currency. This chapter shows how discourses of counterfeiting distinctly frame the social and political geographies of the early American republic. Moreover, the lack of uniform paper currency in the early Republic (which produces social, political, and economic instability) mimics the lack of a uniform understanding of national citizenship in this same period to such a degree that some late eighteenth century authors respond to this dual precarity by proposing that counterfeiting a uniquely American form of self-making, both because the counterfeiting enterprise gives rise to new, albeit economically unstable, homo economici, and because these new economic bodies are themselves forging and/or imitating the dress, behaviors, and codes of propriety in order to capitalize on counterfeit currency. Thus, counterfeiting alleviates some of the anxiety about the lack of uniform national citizenship.Less
This chapter looks to overlapping discussions of American economic health and growth to present a complex story about the circulation of currency as well as the circulation of late-eighteenth century conceptions of American personhood in the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Stephen Burroughs. These imaginative accounts of counterfeiting dramatize the intimate bonds of normative conceptions of citizenship and national currency. This chapter shows how discourses of counterfeiting distinctly frame the social and political geographies of the early American republic. Moreover, the lack of uniform paper currency in the early Republic (which produces social, political, and economic instability) mimics the lack of a uniform understanding of national citizenship in this same period to such a degree that some late eighteenth century authors respond to this dual precarity by proposing that counterfeiting a uniquely American form of self-making, both because the counterfeiting enterprise gives rise to new, albeit economically unstable, homo economici, and because these new economic bodies are themselves forging and/or imitating the dress, behaviors, and codes of propriety in order to capitalize on counterfeit currency. Thus, counterfeiting alleviates some of the anxiety about the lack of uniform national citizenship.
John A Casey
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823265398
- eISBN:
- 9780823266708
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823265398.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Unable to realize their prewar dreams of autonomous work and manhood, many veterans increasingly turned to the past for solace. However, their memories of the war were filled with reminders of the ...
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Unable to realize their prewar dreams of autonomous work and manhood, many veterans increasingly turned to the past for solace. However, their memories of the war were filled with reminders of the violent deaths and violations of social norms associated with combat. These traumatic memories supported the feeling among a significant portion of Civil War veterans that they were different from the general population. In war reminiscences as diverse as Sherman’s Memoirs, Sam Watkins’s personal narrative Company Aytch, and a series of sketches and short stories by Ambrose Bierce, we see veteran authors attempting to understand their war experiences and reconcile the past with the present. Each narrative reflects a different degree of trauma in the writer, but the outcome is the same. Rather than reconnect them to the civilian population, these narratives reaffirm their difference from those who had not fought in the war.Less
Unable to realize their prewar dreams of autonomous work and manhood, many veterans increasingly turned to the past for solace. However, their memories of the war were filled with reminders of the violent deaths and violations of social norms associated with combat. These traumatic memories supported the feeling among a significant portion of Civil War veterans that they were different from the general population. In war reminiscences as diverse as Sherman’s Memoirs, Sam Watkins’s personal narrative Company Aytch, and a series of sketches and short stories by Ambrose Bierce, we see veteran authors attempting to understand their war experiences and reconcile the past with the present. Each narrative reflects a different degree of trauma in the writer, but the outcome is the same. Rather than reconnect them to the civilian population, these narratives reaffirm their difference from those who had not fought in the war.
Barbara Lounsberry
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813056937
- eISBN:
- 9780813053790
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056937.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Though Woolf opposed the darkened waters of the dictators in 1938, in 1939, as the war edges closer, she can’t avoid letting it shade her life and work. On March 22, Madrid “surrender[s]” to the ...
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Though Woolf opposed the darkened waters of the dictators in 1938, in 1939, as the war edges closer, she can’t avoid letting it shade her life and work. On March 22, Madrid “surrender[s]” to the fascists (D 5: 211). The week before, Hitler marches into Prague and proclaims (Woolf writes) that “Czecko-Slovakia has ceased to exist).” Although Woolf's fluidity is affected, she remains bold. In January, she dons the mask of Cleopatra (perhaps ominously) for her brother Adrian's costume party. Using diary form, she starts her memoirs in April. And she continues her inner artistic struggle to resurrect Roger Fry. Across the year, she also seeks life enduring through her own diary—and in many other diaries as well. Some diarists aid her—like her diary-father, Sir Walter Scott. In January, Woolf wishes to also write on the remarkable journals of French painter Eugène Delacroix. However, in August, she finds, in F. L. Lucas's Journal Under the Terror, 1938, an invitation to noble suicide. In the Journals of Charles Ricketts, R. A., the brilliant outsider and friend of Michael Field, which she reads in late December, she meets a diary stopped by war.Less
Though Woolf opposed the darkened waters of the dictators in 1938, in 1939, as the war edges closer, she can’t avoid letting it shade her life and work. On March 22, Madrid “surrender[s]” to the fascists (D 5: 211). The week before, Hitler marches into Prague and proclaims (Woolf writes) that “Czecko-Slovakia has ceased to exist).” Although Woolf's fluidity is affected, she remains bold. In January, she dons the mask of Cleopatra (perhaps ominously) for her brother Adrian's costume party. Using diary form, she starts her memoirs in April. And she continues her inner artistic struggle to resurrect Roger Fry. Across the year, she also seeks life enduring through her own diary—and in many other diaries as well. Some diarists aid her—like her diary-father, Sir Walter Scott. In January, Woolf wishes to also write on the remarkable journals of French painter Eugène Delacroix. However, in August, she finds, in F. L. Lucas's Journal Under the Terror, 1938, an invitation to noble suicide. In the Journals of Charles Ricketts, R. A., the brilliant outsider and friend of Michael Field, which she reads in late December, she meets a diary stopped by war.
Mariusz Kotowski
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780813144887
- eISBN:
- 9780813145105
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813144887.003.0023
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Living in San Antonio, the retired Negri is very active despite her age. As she continues donating to charities and offering encouragement to young actors at various film screenings and festivals, we ...
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Living in San Antonio, the retired Negri is very active despite her age. As she continues donating to charities and offering encouragement to young actors at various film screenings and festivals, we are reminded that despite all of her fame, Negri has preserved a humble, humanitarian attitude. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that this strong, talented woman and her life story, told through her autobiography Memoirs of a Star, continue to incite awe and respect all over the world.Less
Living in San Antonio, the retired Negri is very active despite her age. As she continues donating to charities and offering encouragement to young actors at various film screenings and festivals, we are reminded that despite all of her fame, Negri has preserved a humble, humanitarian attitude. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that this strong, talented woman and her life story, told through her autobiography Memoirs of a Star, continue to incite awe and respect all over the world.
Daniel M. Stout
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823272235
- eISBN:
- 9780823272273
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823272235.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter three looks at James Hogg’s 1824 novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It argues that the book criticizes both Calvinism and Romantic nationalism for their ...
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Chapter three looks at James Hogg’s 1824 novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It argues that the book criticizes both Calvinism and Romantic nationalism for their incoherent theories of identity. Both Calvinism and Romantic nationalism imagine identity as an unchanging property or state that individual persons inherit and possess regardless of their actions in the here and now. The debilitating consequences of this position are shown in the Sinner’s sense that, though he lives in the world, he doesn’t act in it.Less
Chapter three looks at James Hogg’s 1824 novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It argues that the book criticizes both Calvinism and Romantic nationalism for their incoherent theories of identity. Both Calvinism and Romantic nationalism imagine identity as an unchanging property or state that individual persons inherit and possess regardless of their actions in the here and now. The debilitating consequences of this position are shown in the Sinner’s sense that, though he lives in the world, he doesn’t act in it.
